User Reviews

"To photograph people is to violate them. It turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder— a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time." - Susan Sontag

"I like stylisation. I try to get away with as much as possible until people start laughing at it." – Brian De Palma

"I love De Palma. I loved Mission to Mars." – Andrew Bujalski

Brian De Palma's "Hi, Mom!" stars Robert De Niro as Jon Rubin, an amateur pornographer who purchases a run down Greenwich Village apartment so that he can set up a camera and secretly film his neighbours in various acts of sex and undress, a new form of porno he calls "peep art". The film spoofs the politics of sex and free love, the efficacy of "radical art" and engages in a bizarre discourse which links the camera and phallus to voyeurism, radicalism, racism, war and television (De Palma has been obsessed with such reflexivity since "The Responsive Eye"). As the film progresses it then becomes increasingly episodic, Rubin becoming the star of one of his own films, an experimental theatre actor, a "black" militant and a lone anarchist.

One of De Palma's earliest films was "Dionysus in 69", a film based on "The Bacchae", a Euripides play. That film was about a now common De Palma obsession: the hazards, anxieties and violence of the male gaze. In it, Pentheus spies on nocturnal females, an act which angers them. In retaliation they tear off the head of this voyeur. In the film Dionysius and Pentheus also share an intimate, homosexual moment, a scene which anticipates the homo-eroticism, camp qualities, gender explorations and gender constructions of De Palma's early sex thrillers. For De Palma, all gender is a performance, and white male heterosexuality must be consistently constructed in opposition to some external Other, often employing homosexuality to definite itself against. As normative heterosexual manhood is an impossible, and impossibly maintained, ideal, it has a preponderance toward dissolution and periodic, violent quests for wholeness. What "Hi, Mom!" is preoccupied with, though, is the way the whole homo-social sphere engages in voyeurism to construct masculinity, how looking and seeing and objectifying (be it of women or blacks or Vietnamese) is intimately linked with the construction of a white, male, hegemonic, ideal subject, and how this need derives from a lack which itself threatens the subject with homo-eroticism and marks it as perpetually emasculated. Like all of De Palma's films, "Hi, Mom!" is also obsessed with the untrustworthiness of the eye/retina/camera/object, and, unintentionally, the psycho-sexual anxieties which drive civilians and the State to spy, engage in surveillance and concoct conspiracies.

But it's "Hi, Mom's!" "Be Black Baby" sequence that is its most successful. "Be Black Baby" intends for its white, liberal audience, to not just "intellectualize" being black, but to really "feel what it's like". After being painted black, treated as blacks and bullied by blacks in white face, a gun is then pulled on we the audience, forcing us to watch as a woman is raped. It is then that Rubin (Robert DeNiro is electric), who joined the cast after his failed "peep art" project, barges in as a cop. But rather than arrest the rapists and their accomplices, Rubin arrests the audience, treating them to a terrifying display of authoritarian bullying.

The white liberals are then shown the door, and made aware that this flagrant overstepping of boundaries was the show's method of entering the black experience. The punch line, of course, is that everything shown to us in the "Be Black Baby" experience is not the real, or at least whole, black experience. The black experience is this: to be denied the power of being a voyeur, to be denied the option of looking down on others, to be forced to construct ones identity or voice in opposition to a privileged vantage point. The black experience is never on "that" side of the camera.

The "Be Black Baby" audience then praises the "Living Theater of Cruelty" for its excesses. But the mechanics and power of "Be Black Baby" - forcing others to be something they're not in the most violating way possible, itself the greatest illusion, power, and responsibility of all art – then dissipates the moment the con is revealed.

De Palma then hits us with an episode (the film is structured as a series of demented variety show episodes, each introduced by on screen graphics) in which Rubin hooks up with a group of militants. Inspired by "Be Black Baby's" excess, Rubin convinces various leftists to bring their message directly to the people through violence. He then convinces them to attack a white high rise apartment, but unfortunately, whilst carrying out their strategy, the group is ambushed.

Rubin watches this all on television (while reading The Urban Guerilla), smashing his set to pieces when he realises that his plan has failed. To Rubin, the next logical step is anarchy. The film itself moves deliberately from voyeurism, to art, to physical violence. In the film's final sequence (a domestic spoof), Rubin lights a stick of dynamite and blows a building sky high. The punch line? Interviewed at the scene of the explosion, Rubin defends his action without giving himself away and then asks if he could say just one more thing. "Hi, Mom!" he shouts into the camera. Freeze frame. Cheesy sitcom music. End credits.

The film's aesthetic is Godardian, its anarchic impulses and disdainful relationship to narrative cohesion echoing its wild, lawless on screen characters. Like early Godard, it is also indicative of a certain political impasse: the inability of art or action to provide either the truth or change. Response: a very specific, nihilistic, raging, emasculated anarchy.

8/10 – De Palma's "Greetings", "Hi, Mom!", "Scarface" and "Dressed to Kill" would all receive X ratings.

Reminding me in many ways of John Cassavetes very personal early film "Shadows", this early Brian DePalma film has to be seen to be believed. In fact, it takes the styles of many previous independent art house directors and modernizes it in a way that could not be copied. Part of the film is so realistic and frightening and even militant that you wonder if they gathered a bunch of strangers off the street and films them without them being aware that this was only part of a movie. Those sequences, part of the infamous "Be Black Baby" subplot, are shot incomplete documentary-style, making me interested in seeing an actual documentary on the making of this film.

It's real theater of the streets when a bunch of white people are utilized in what they think is experimental theater that turns out to be a little bit too realistic where they are made to be black and the black actors all of a sudden are white. Insinuations of robbery, rape and shootings are followed by the arrival of a white cop played by Robert De Niro, and it is all part of the performance art staged to make a point. The screams and shouts and crying all seem to real to be acted out, and it's probably one of the most bizarre sequences in a cult film ever, the one that can never be forgotten.

Repeating his role from the DePalma film 'Greetings", DeNiro what is a voyeur, moving into an apartment building on LaGuardia way where he sets up his camera to film neighbors across the street, becoming infatuated with the insecure Jennifer Salt whom he basically cons into going out on a date. Looking very funny in his curly wig, a somewhat thin Charles Durning is a hoot as the landlord. Daniel auditions for the role of the cop within the experimental play, and it's that sequence that really becomes the focal point especially after the three stars confront a variety of white people on the street to ask them if they know what it's like to be black in America.

The funniest element of that segment is people after they realize what they have just gone through, exhausted and still panicky but exhilarated carried out by single and seemingly enlightened, but the question is whether or not that will remain. It certainly should be explained what the title is referring to because you certainly never meet anybody's mom, but you do get a glimpse into what New York what it was like as far as its counterculture 50 years ago. The film is a little whack as far as retaining a linear story, situation with DeNiro and Salt basically dropped for much of the movie. To think that both De Niro and DePalma have gone on to legendary status after seeing their early films is a testament to the motivations that got them into the industry in the first place, and this is certainly a must for film students.