Un-American Psycho

Brian De Palma is perhaps best known as the director behind the gangster classicScarface. Yet as ingrained asScarfaceis in American popular culture, it is but one of a sizeable number of controversial films-many of which are consistently misread or ignored-directed by De Palma over his more than four-decade career. InUn-American Psycho,Chris Dumas places De Palma's 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 Palma's filmmaking. De Palma's 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.