Brian De Palma is obsessed with doubles and doubling, and that’s nowhere clearer than in his 1976 film Obsession, a bizarre doppelganger of Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s film about bizarre doppelgangers. As in Sisters, De Palma’s remake is about its own failure to imitate the master, and about the perversity of replication which is at the heart of imitation and of film.
Again as in Sisters (and Vertigo) the plot of Obsession is deliberately and improbably contrived. In 1959, Louisiana real estate developer Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson) has wealth, riches, love and everything anyone could desire—until his wife Elizabeth (Geneviève Bujold) and his daughter Amy are kidnapped. The police advise him not to hand over the money, then bungle the rescue, and his family dies. He’s still guilt-stricken 16 years later, when on a trip to Florence, he meets Sandra (also Bujold) an exact lookalike of his deceased wife. Despite the concern of his business partner Bob LaSalle (John Lithgow), Michael decides to marry Sandra—only for her to be kidnapped on the eve of their wedding.
The duplication of Sandra and of the kidnapping are a set-up. Bob arranged original kidnapping to gain control of the business from Michael. Amy didn’t die; Bob squirrelled her away and told her that her father had betrayed her. Sandra is Michael’s daughter, and helped Bob with the second kidnapping plot.
If you don’t follow all that, that’s because it’s overly complicated and doesn’t make any sense. The main point is to evoke Hitchcock, narrative coherence be damned.
And evoke Hitchcock it does. De Palma’s plot recapitulates, not just itself, but Vertigo. In that film, a man feels he’s guilty of a woman’s death, encounters her “double,” and eventually discovers that both women are the same, and their doubling is a deceit. Hitchcock, as is his wont, punishes the scheming woman, and validates the (temporarily) weak/mentally-ill man. The double vision resolves itself, eventually, into a singular story of male empowerment and vindication.
The narrative arc in Obsession is less clear cut. Most notably, as the studio noted at the time with some horror, the movie dabbles with incest. The film’s coy about showing Michael and Amy kissing, and Amy makes some quip about her Catholicism, which is supposed to indicate she plans to save sex till after marriage. But these evasions are clearly evasions; Michael’s in love with Amy, and a dream sequence makes it plain he plans to have sex with her. The ravishing operatic score (Bernard Herrmann’s last), which layers on the romanticism as they gaze at each other, emphasizes their love and yearning. Even when Michael realizes at the end of the film that Amy’s his daughter, he isn’t horrified. He just takes it in stride that the woman he was planning to marry is instead his child.
The film’s blasé aphasiac treatment of the father/daughter romance is generally seen as a thematic flaw, and for good reason. The flaw, the mess, and the aphasia is arguably the point. De Palma’s trying to reproduce Hitchcock’s masterpiece, just as Michael is trying to reproduce, or rewrite, his own plot and past. That reproduction, though, is impossible and perverse. Hitchcock is De Palma’s father who he wants to be, to replace, and to love. The result is a ridiculous bastard child that barely knows who it is, as it goes through the motions of reverence like a parrot repeating an empty pledge of devotion.
The blinkered obsession here isn’t just De Palma’s, though; it’s, at least by implication, the film viewers’ as well. The false image of the woman in Vertigo is a metaphor for the false image of film; the male viewer’s dazzled, drawn in, disoriented, unmanned by the replica of Kim Novak, which is also the vision of Kim Novak on film.
In Vertigo that vision is, by the end, mastered, controlled, revealed. It’s in Obsession as well—but the truth that’s revealed by De Palma is a core of wrongness that can neither be undone, assimilated, nor confronted. Amy/Sandra clings to Michael at the end, shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” Her head lolls in some sort of catastrophic regression which mirrors De Palma’s own childlike tribute to/obsession with his father, Hitchcock. And it also mirrors the way that viewers turn for comfort and meaning to film, that ersatz, queasy substitute for reality and God.