The last couple of De Palma films I’ve written about—Scarface and Casualties of War—were big-budget Hollywood morality plays, with mainstream cred and generally solid mainstream reviews. Raising Cain (1992), in contrast, is a return to De Palma’s B-movie exploitation roots. It makes no sense and was largely critically panned.
It’s also much, much better than De Palma’s Hollywood genre exercises. The incoherence of the script is a liberation, as the characters wander around like lightly-stunned mannequins in some dream ballet. The climactic sequence around a hotel staircase and elevator, with John Lithgow appearing and disappearing in flashes of ridiculous lucidity, is a masterpiece of scuzzy nonsense sublime. It’s one of De Palma’s great triumphs of style over substance, and/or of transmuting style into substance.
As to the substance, such as it is—the film is centered on child psychologist Carter Nix (Lithgow). Through a long, torturous plot we learn that Carter’s father, also a child psychologist, (played by Lithgow as well) abused Carter in order to study the formation of multiple personality disorder. Father Nix was arrested for kidnapping children and presumed dead; he’s alive, though, and has recruited Carter, and his alternate personalities (including the evil Cain) to help him murder women and steal their children.
The scheming starts to unravel when Carter discovers his wife Jenny (Davidovich), is having an affair with her old flame Jack (Steven Bauer). That leads Carter/Cain to try to murder Jenny and steal their own child, Amy.
That all sounds ridiculous enough, but it undersells just how preposterous and fragmented the narrative is. An extended sequence in the middle of the film involves a series of flashbacks and dreams within dreams as Jenny remembers a tryst with Jack at the park, then imagines sleeping with him in his hotel room, then imagines a car wreck in which she’s impaled on a phallic protrusion from a statue—and then we shift to reality, where Carter (taken over by Cain) suffocates her with a pillow while experiencing his own flashback to watching her in the park and murdering another woman.
It's difficult to keep track of what’s really happening and what is dream or memory in part because there’s no stable reality to judge the flights of fancy by; everything is equally improbable and equally surreal. Which is undoubtedly the point. De Palma’s obsessed with the way that identity is bifurcated or dissolved or scrambled in film, where viewers identify with multiple characters who are all themselves also at least two—the actor and the person the actor’s playing. Lithgow plays Carter, Carter’s brother, an alter who seems like a stand-in for Carter’s mother, Carter’s father, and (for a while) the psychiatrist interrogating him, whose identity he steals to escape a police station. Davidovich also plays Jenny and various alternate Jenny dream-selves, who can desire things and sexual pleasure she can’t, just as viewers go to movies to explore alternate selves and desires.
This terrain—of dreams, multiple identities, role playing—was explored to significantly greater acclaim by David Lynch, especially in his later movies. The difference is that Lynch embraced art cinema more obviously and enthusiastically, throwing away the Hitchcockian thriller/slasher/exploitation framework.
De Palma loves the sleaze. He even loves the endless psychobabble exposition; there’s one endless scene in which cops guide a therapist through the police station as she explains Carter’s trauma. She keeps making wrong turns and having to be redirected, a sly acknowledgement, perhaps, that her analysis, with all its own twists and turns, doesn’t get anywhere, even though it may be fun to watch her run through the maze.
Similarly, it’s fun to watch Lithgow turn himself seamlessly, and joyfully, into so many different people. We enjoy the game of it—which puts us in the position of the elder Dr. Nix, who created the multiple Carter for his own edification just as De Palma creates the multiple Lithgow for ours.
Raising Cain imagines the viewer and the director engaged in the pleasurable joint project of cultivating and observing deviancy—which is also the joint project of cultivating deviancy in oneself. The movie’s a machine for creating multiple personalities in a controlled environment. And where Hitchcock carefully ended his films by restoring control and moralizing about the evils of weirdness, De Palma revels in slipping out of the patriarchal order. It’s not an accident that Lithgow’s female mother alter turns out to be the one who saves the kids; a trans heroine of sorts in response to Hitchcock’s trans villain in Psycho.
For De Palma, the mad or abnormal person in the film—the person who has no one age, no one gender, no one desire, no one love, no one self—is you. No wonder, then, that the film made for you is a multiple fugue that, gloriously, refuses to fit itself into the shape of any one logic, or any one voice.