Un-American Psycho

Brian De Palma is perhaps best known as the director behind the gangster classic Scarface. Yet as ingrained as Scarface is in American popular culture, it is but one of a sizeable number of controversial filmsmany of which are consistently misread or ignoreddirected by De Palma over his more than four-decade career. In Un-American Psycho, Chris Dumas places De Palmas body of work in dialogue with the works of other provocative filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francis Ford Coppola with the aim of providing a broader understanding of the narrative, stylistic, and political gestures that characterize De Palmas filmmaking. De Palmas films engage with a wide range of issues surrounding American political and social culture, and this volume offers a rethinking of the received wisdom on his work.