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Hi, Mom!
WHAT THE FUCK!??!?
1970
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Robert De Niro, Jennifer Salt
It may help reveal the hidden sense of this. Or it may not.
THE SETUP:
Early Brian De Palma film in which Robert De Niro plays a strange man who gets caught up with 70s black revolutionaries.
DISCUSSION:
This is one weird fucking movie. I watched it as part of my recent drive to see all the Brian De Palma movies that I haven't yet seen, and I had heard that this one is an early comedy that is loose and hilarious.
Loose, yes.
The movie concerns a pre-Mean Streets / Taxi Driver Robert De Niro playing Jon, a Viet Nam vet who attempts to break into the pornography industry by selling a film showing the activities of the people in the apartment building across from him. When this fails, he hooks up with some black revolutionaries, who are staging an "immersive" theater piece called "Be Black Baby," to show whites what it means to be black. After that, he decides that the revolutionaries must storm the white apartment complex, then they do, he shoots his television, becomes a white yuppie himself, blows up his apartment building, and says "Hi" to his mom on TV.
There isn't much to hold onto in this movie, but what is there in force is De Palma's interest in voyeurism and recorded sound / image. As Jon records the people in the apartment across from him, many of them are either filming or recording themselves, and much of the movie itself is seen on a smaller screen within the film. I think in this movie the voyeurism has a corollary in all the content about a white person experiencing life as a black person. So, it's all there, but what is it all saying? Got me.
The centerpiece of the film is a 20-minute film-within-the-film which is the performance of "Be Black Baby." This is an avant-garde theater piece intended to let white people experience what it's like to be black by painting them in blackface, verbally abusing them, robbing, shooting, and raping them. This sequence actually becomes quite terrifying, but part of the joke is that immediately afterwards all of the white participants talk about how it helped them understand the black experience and how they're going to tell all of their friends that they HAVE to do it.
This movie features a very loose, funny performance from De Niro, and Jennifer Salt being much more charming than she was in De Palma's Sisters. Personally, I found this movie more flat-out bizarre than really funny or entertaining, but I also suspect that I'm missing the point.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
I wouldn't, really, unless you're a hardcore De Palma enthusiast.
