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Moving Pictures
Jan 28, 2025, 06:25AM

De Palma Doubles Hitchcock in Sisters

And also doesn’t double him.

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Sisters (1973) is one of Brian De Palma’s first signature films—and it bears someone else’s signature. De Palma framed his own career as a long footnote to Hitchcock, and Sisters established his obsession with being someone else through its obsessive homage to Hitchcock classics like Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window.

De Palma’s mirroring of Hitchcock was always an imperfect duplication, not least in the way that De Palma substitutes for Hitchcock’s obsessive perfection an obsession with imperfection, failure, and the loss of Hitchcock’s suave control. Sisters is the first in a long series of De Palma’s failed Hitchcock films, in which the perfect vision becomes doubled, blurred, and obscured.

As in much of De Palma’s films, the plot’s just a transparent excuse for plot twists, but broadly the movie is about a serial killer. Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), a young Long Island newspaperwoman, who looks out her window to an apartment across the courtyard and sees Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder) stab a man, Phillip (Lisle Wilson), to death.

Danielle has cleaned up the body with the help of her estranged spouse Emil (William Finley). Grace keeps investigating and discovers that Danielle is a Siamese twin recently separated from her double, Dominique. At first it seems like Dominique may have murdered Phillip, but it turns out Dominique is dead. Danielle was traumatized by their separation, and takes on the alternative murderous persona of Dominique whenever she has sex or is aroused.

This brief outline only hints at DePalma’s obsession with the Hitchcockian themes of doubling, voyeurism, psychotherapy, and sexual obsession. The film opens, for example, with a visual prank; Phillip and Danielle meet as contestants on a Candid Camera style show; Danielle is pretending to be a blind woman who’s gone into the wrong locker room, and Phillip (the mark) has to decide if he should watch her undress, or let her know she’s made an error.

Right from the beginning, then, De Palma sets up a situation where the person who sees is “blind” or tricked, where the “blind” person can see, and where the viewers are tricked into watching a fake scene which we pretend is actually fake. The staged scene is a staged scene—a movie of a show in which you almost, but not quite, get to see Margot Kidder undress.

The shell game with blindness and vision, with looking and not looking, is similar to Hitchcock’s winking thematization of the gaze as a focus of control and pathology. Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window is positioned with the viewer, whose look makes the nefarious plot unspool, even as the look itself is delusional and obsessive, a kind of trap entangling the looker in the false consciousness, or fantasy, that is the film itself.

Hitchcock, though, virtually always ends his films with a reassertion of a patriarchal, normative order—Stewart was right about the wrongdoings in Rear Window after all; the doctor comes in at the end to reassuringly and rationally explains all the ins and outs of Norman Bates’ twisted psyche in Psycho. Hitchcock tells his viewers that they’re entangled in the psychosis that is the movies, complete with obsession, blindness, and false consciousness. And then, just before the lights come up, he reveals the final twist, which is that you are you, what you see is what you see, and the world’s under control after all.

De Palma in Sisters, on the other (other) hand, refuses to recalibrate your glasses. The closer Grace gazes, the less she sees; her investigation leads her to greater and greater cognitive confusion and even madness. This is thematized early in the film by the one visual quirk De Palma did not get from Hitchcock; a split screen, in which you see both Grace’s viewpoint and Phillip’s simultaneously, a twinned mirrored gaze of and at death.

Later this doubled vision becomes even more literal. Grace tracks Emil and Danielle to an insane asylum, where it turns out Emil’s the chief doctor. He captures her, subdues her, and then hypnotizes her.

In a surreal sequence, Emil then prompts Grace to see Danielle’s history—placing herself in the position of Dominique, Danielle’s conjoined twin. Grace becomes Danielle’s double; she is and isn’t Danielle, stapled to her just as you, watching, link yourself to, or identify with, Grace. And just as you, the watcher, can’t effect what happens on screen, so Grace is disempowered and symbolically castrated (Danielle always stabs her victims in the crotch). Grace is to move or intervene, even as, flashback completed, Danielle murders Emil on top of Grace’s sleeping body.

Danielle’s arrested, and the cops show up—but the film still doesn’t offer an easy resolution. Emil hypnotized Grace to believe that she didn’t see Danielle murder Phillip. When the police interview her, she keeps saying that there was no body and no murder.

The movie ends in rural Canada. A private detective, hired by Grace, is up a telephone pole, looking through binoculars at a couch sitting outdoors next to a shack. The couch is the hiding place of Phillip’s body, and the detective expects the murderer to come and pick it up. But the murderer is in custody; no one is coming. The gaze is futile and endless—and endless because it’s futile. The movie’s conclusion is no conclusion. Even when you think you know all the answers, the gaze, and the film, still lead you only to a dead end.

That’s in part because the film isn’t real—as Danielle says, there’s no body, there was no murder. Hitchcock’s endings—in which viewers are assured that their gaze was controlled and accurate all along—are the final blinding thumb in the eye. Hitchcock lies by telling you that you’re able, once the film is over, to see the truth. De Palma, in contrast, insists that the more you see, the less you know. To watch a movie is to be torn from yourself. Immersed in the gaze, in identification, in the fantasy of life, you don’t know what you see, or even whose body sits on your couch.

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