Success Quote by Brian De Palma

De Palma is doing that very De Palma thing: calling out the reviewers for watching the surface of the movie instead of the movie itself. The line is half complaint, half diagnosis of a critical reflex. When critics “analyze it like a straight noir movie,” they’re treating style as reality, mistaking a deliberately artificial mode for the film’s actual operating system. De Palma’s surprised tone is telling, too. He’s not shocked they disliked it; he’s shocked they misread the grammar.

The key phrase is “noir story in the dream sequence.” Noir, for him, isn’t a genre box to check, it’s a psychological filter: paranoia, fatalism, erotic dread. Put it inside a dream and it becomes an alibi for excess, a permission slip for heightened lighting, overheated plotting, and performances that tilt toward the uncanny. The dream frame isn’t a twist; it’s a warning label. You’re not supposed to evaluate the events like evidence in a case file, because the “case” is the character’s mind staging a melodrama to process guilt, desire, or fear.

There’s also a sly power move here. By locating noir inside a dream, De Palma implies that realism is the wrong yardstick for his cinema. His films are about manipulation - of images, of spectators, of what we call “truth” on screen. If the reviews missed the dream logic, they missed his central point: the movie isn’t failing to be coherent noir; it’s succeeding at being a critique of coherence.