Un-American Psycho

“Well analyzed.”

“Un-American Psycho is organized in large part around salvaging the reputation of Brian De Palma, a filmmaker whose name is commonly—and usually negatively—mentioned in the same breath as Hitchcock’s. . . . Debut author Chris Dumas is giving De Palma his due. And in so doing, he’s arming the next generation of De Palma defenders with some seriously heavy artillery.”

“The considerable significance of this book lies not in the critique of that beleaguered discipline it so energetically advances, but rather in what it shows by example— namely that scholarly work on cinema can still dare, as it did in the 1970s, to read philosophy, politics, and history together, to make systematic claims, to overreach, to hyperbolize, to use irony, to venture beyond empiricism, to unapologetically engage psychoanalysis, to not merely apply a method but to radically question the foundations of several.”