In Sisters and Obsession, the two De Palma films I’ve looked at so far, the director lifts themes and narratives from Hitchcock—but does it so imperfectly he ends up with a cinema of failure that’s distinctively his own.
In contrast, 1978’s The Fury is less indebted to other directors; its most obvious precursor is De Palma’s own Carrie from 1976. And yet, in borrowing from himself, De Palma ends up with a movie that’s less personal, and more like generic Hollywood product—not least because its ending is a very uncharacteristic empowerment fantasy.
To be fair, De Palma seems uncomfortable enough with the empowerment fantasy that he has to crawl through twisty exposition to get there. The film initially seems like its protagonist is Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas), a government agent stationed in Israel. Peter’s psychic high-school aged son, Robin (Andrew Stevens) is kidnapped by Peter’s nefarious colleague Ben Childress (a seductively smarmy John Cassavetes) and taken to Chicago. A lot of the run time is chewed up with cloak and dagger hijinks, with Douglas deploying his considerable charm to elevate an otherwise pedestrian script.
Eventually it becomes clear that our main focus isn’t Peter at all, but Gillian Bellaver (Amy Irving), another psychic teen who can make people bleed when she touches them. Gillian’s in mental contact with Robin and Peter eventually connects with her to track down his missing son.
In Carrie, psychic powers function as metaphor for directorial, and audience, investment. Carrie moves things with her mind, which means she’s essentially the movie itself, staging deadly electrocutions or stranglings with no visible cause other than special effects, or the will of the film. Carrie’s badly bullied, and the audience roots for her to take revenge and is horrified by that vengeance. The movie becomes about the way that empowerment fantasies are also, often, murder fantasies; you, as watcher, are present in the film as a kind of all-powerful ghost, controlling, and/or failing to control the homicidal mise en scene.
The Fury gestures at some of the same dynamics. Childress tells Robin his father is dead, killed by Arab terrorists. That trauma’s compounded by Childress’ deliberate psychological manipulations—he orders Dr. Susan Charles (Fiona Lewis) to initiate a sexual relationship with Robin.
Though the goal is to control Robin, the combination of his father’s loss and the grooming/sexual abuse makes him unstable and volatile. He murders Arab tourists at an amusement park in Chicago as revenge for his father’s death, and becomes increasingly jealous and mistrustful of Susan. In a Carrie-like scene, he psychically tortures her, lifting her into the air and ordering her to spin around as he whirls her bloody body through the air. He’s a metaphor for De Palma—the sadist with absolute power coldly and dispassionately directing the spectacular set piece that is Susan’s death.
The problem is that emotionally and thematically there’s not a lot going on beyond a spectacular set-piece. Carrie is Carrie’s movie. The Fury should in some sense be Robin’s film—but he’s barely in it. We never really get to see good Robin, so the transformation to bad Robin feels flat. Gillian, who’s psychically linked to the boy, is horrified at his murderous violence, but viewers don’t have that visceral connection, because De Palma hasn’t bothered to forge it. Robin’s violence doesn’t implicate us since he’s not really a character. Like the film, he’s just going through the motions.
Gillian gets significantly more screen time, and has her own chance to embrace uber-violence in the final scene, where she makes Childress explode (somewhere David Cronenberg was watching). Again, though, there’s little of the ambivalence that makes Carrie so powerful. Childress is a supervillain, and he gets his just desserts. Gillian is less Carrie than she is Luke Skywalker—a psychic hero at one with the Force and/or at one with the Hollywood protagonist plot arc. When she embraces her powers, she also embraces the standard virtuous narrative, in which the good triumph and the evil are punished.
Even when he’s doing what’s essentially hack work, De Palma’s an entertaining filmmaker who manages to slip in his own personal obsessions. The Fury includes violent spectacle, Oedipal themes, and even anxieties around doubling thanks to the parallels between Robin and Gillian. Ultimately, though, a good De Palma film is one in which the resolution is a bizarre failure by standard Hollywood metrics. The Fury in contrast, is a movie in which the good guys win and the bad guys lose—a sure sign that De Palma was neither invested nor inspired.