The Black Dahlia, Brian De Palma’s lurid 2006 adaptation of James Ellroy’s 1987 novel, hit me like a gut-punch when I first caught it in my tender, impressionable teens—back when my cinematic diet was a toxic slurry of late-night cable reruns and bootleg DVDs scored from sketchy flea markets. Curled up on a sagging couch in the dim glow of a CRT television, I devoured its feverish swirl of Hollywood underbelly, severed heads bobbing in bathtubs, and detectives drowning in their own obsessions, thinking it was the pinnacle of adult sophistication. Fast-forward two decades, and revisiting it now, in the harsh light of a 4K Blu-ray on a flat-screen that doesn’t forgive a single frame’s excess, it’s an atomic clusterfuck in every conceivable sense: narratively bloated, visually grotesque, thematically unmoored, and yet, perversely magnetic. Even in the year of its premiere, amid the mid-aughts glut of prestige period pieces like Scorsese’s The Departed or Pan’s Labyrinth, it didn’t pass for palatable. Critics eviscerated it—Roger Ebert called it "a mess," while the New York Times deemed it "a glossy, empty-headed entertainment"—and audiences stayed away in droves, grossing a paltry $23 million domestically against a $50 million budget. But here’s the rub: that messiness isn’t a bug; it’s the feature, a hallucinatory plunge into the septic tank of 1940s Los Angeles that parodies noir so hard it circles back to genius. Or something like that. In an ideal world, Ellroy’s labyrinthine tome— a 500-page fever dream of corruption, incest, and celebrity necrophilia—would have fallen into the lap of David Fincher, who could have alchemized it into a three-hour monolithic noir, all clinical dread and pixel-perfect decay, with Eva Green as the titular Dahlia, her porcelain fragility cracking into something venomous and eternal. But no, Fincher’s magnum opus in cinema turned out to be Mank, that black-and-white hermetic puzzle box from 2020, another dive into the 1940s Hollywood cesspool, swapping dismembered torsos and sadomasochistic romps for endless typewriter clacks and meta-meta navel-gazing about authorship and alcoholism. Mank has its own nagging questions—chief among them, why does it feel like a TED Talk scripted by a depressed archivist? —but more on that later. For now, let’s wallow in De Palma’s Dahlia, that unintentional camp opus where the line between horror and hilarity dissolves like lipstick in the rain. Ellroy’s novel, the second in his L.A. Quartet after The Black Echo, isn’t just a crime story; it’s a seismic rupture in the American psyche, channeling the real-life 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short— the Black Dahlia, as the tabloids dubbed her after her bisected body was found drained of blood in a Leimert Park vacant lot—into a sprawling indictment of postwar rot. Short’s case, one of L.A.'s most enduring unsolved riddles, obsessed Ellroy from boyhood; his own mother was murdered when he was ten, an event that scarred him into a lifetime of amphetamine-fueled writing binges and confessional rage. The book interweaves the investigation by fictional detectives Bucky Bleichert (the "White Dawn") and Lee Blanchard (the "Blue Dahlia") with a web of Z-movie starlets, bent cops, and pornographers, all orbiting the Dahlia’s grotesque allure. Themes of voyeurism, racial undercurrents, and the myth-making machinery of Hollywood collide in prose that’s as jagged as a switchblade: short, brutal sentences that punch like haymakers, laced with period slang and the author’s trademark misanthropy. It’s unfilmable in the best way—too dense, too depraved, too defiantly literary for Hollywood’s sanitizing gaze. Enter De Palma, the maestro of high-camp Hitchcockian excess, whose filmography is a Rolodex of stylish psychos: from the split-screen sadism of Carrie (1976) to the voyeuristic vertigo of Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981), and Body Double (1984). By 2006, at 65, De Palma was no stranger to adaptation pitfalls—his Mission: Impossible (1996) had salvaged Tom Cruise from obscurity, but Snake Eyes (1998) and Femme Fatale (2002) had flirted with self-parody. The Black Dahlia was his stab at Ellroy’s crown jewel, scripted by Josh Friedman in a valiant but vain attempt to cram the novel’s sprawl into 121 minutes. The result? A film that apes noir aesthetics to the hilt—smoky jazz clubs, fedora shadows, rain-slicked streets—only to undermine them with such gleeful, inadvertent absurdity that it becomes a parody of the genre it loves. Where it should chill the spine, it tickles the funny bone; where dread should coil, farce uncoils like a bad burlesque routine. It’s not scary—it’s sidesplitting, in the way a train wreck is mesmerizing. Take the opening sequence, a boxing-ring rumble between Bucky (Josh Hartnett, all brooding cheekbones and haunted puppy eyes) and Lee (Aaron Eckhart, channeling a smarmy Rock Hudson with a dash of meth-head jitter). Shot in De Palma’s signature split-diopter frenzy—foreground and background racked into unnatural focus—the fight is meant to establish their bromance-turned-bloodsport, a microcosm of L.A.'s pugilistic undercurrents. But Hartnett’s Bucky, with his perpetual quiver-lip and thousand-yard stare, looks less like a hardened detective than a J.Crew model who’s wandered onto the wrong set. Eckhart’s Lee grins like a used-car salesman hawking a lemon, his charm curdling into cartoon villainy so fast it’s almost endearing. As they pummel each other to a pulp for a Sun Valley ski lodge stake (a nod to Ellroy’s real-estate fever dreams), the crowd roars in grainy newsreel footage, and you can’t help but chuckle: this is noir? More like a Rocky audition reel directed by a drag queen on quaaludes. The violence, which escalates to Dahlia-esque savagery later—torsos filleted like Sunday roasts, heads bisected with surgical glee—lands with the impact of a whoopee cushion. De Palma, ever the showman, revels in the gore not for verisimilitude but for visceral pop, staging murders in hallucinatory slow-motion that owes more to Suspiria than The Maltese Falcon. A key kill, involving a starlet’s evisceration amid mirrored vanity tables, unfolds like a Busby Berkeley blood ballet: limbs akimbo, entrails looping like Busby chorines, the camera swooping in pornographic close-ups that linger on quivering flesh and pooling crimson. It’s meant to horrify, to echo the Dahlia’s real autopsy photos (which Ellroy pored over obsessively), but the effect is pure camp—unwittingly hilarious, like watching a slasher flick scripted by a horny mortician. You laugh not at the victims' plight, but at the sheer, unapologetic audacity of it all: De Palma doesn’t just show the corpse; he caresses it, turning tragedy into a fetish object. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, the Hungarian émigré wizard behind McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and The Deer Hunter (1978), here deploys his arsenal in service of De Palma’s most lascivious impulses. Zsigmond’s noir palette—inky blacks bleeding into jaundiced yellows, sodium-vapor streetlamps casting elongated ghouls—should evoke the genre’s fatalistic gloom, but he outdoes himself with angles that veer straight into necrophilic erotica. Peering up skirts at thigh-high stockings laddered with desperation, or down plunging décolletages where nipples strain like accusatory fingers, the camera becomes a Peeping Tom on steroids. In one notorious sequence, as Bucky infiltrates a porn ring run by the sinister Bauer family (led by a scenery-chewing Fiona Shaw as the matriarch Ramona, all pursed lips and pearl-clutching psychosis), Zsigmond’s lens probes the action like a gynecologist with a grudge: explicit inserts of writhing bodies, sweat-slicked and silicone-enhanced, intercut with Bucky’s stoic voyeurism. It’s De Palma’s wet dream realized—echoing the director’s own obsessions in films like Scarface (1983), where excess is the ultimate high—but in the context of Ellroy’s grim tapestry, it registers as parody. The sex isn’t steamy; it’s surgical, a clinical dissection of desire that reduces human connection to meat hooks and moans. Zsigmond, at 76 during filming, brings a master’s touch to the period authenticity—L.A.'s art deco facades reconstructed with meticulous grit, from the Bradbury Building’s filigreed ironwork to the Ambassador Hotel’s palm-fringed pools—but he can’t resist the pornographic flourish. One shot, tracking Bucky’s gaze across a tableau of flagellation (whips cracking like punctuation marks), uses a fish-eye distortion that warps the frame into a funhouse mirror of depravity. Potent? Yes. Subtle? About as much as a sledgehammer enema. And yet, in this excess lies the film’s twisted allure: Zsigmond doesn’t just light the shadows; he sets them ablaze, turning De Palma’s Dahlia into a nocturnal fever that scorches the retina long after the credits roll. The score, courtesy of Mark Isham, amplifies this baroque bombast with a Morricone-esque swagger that teeters on self-satire. Isham, a jazz trumpeter turned composer whose credits span The Hitcher (1986) to Point Break (1991), here channels the Italian master’s spaghetti western wails—lonely harmonicas keening over desolate canyons, mariachi horns blaring like trumpets of doom—but repurposes them for urban decay. As Bucky and Lee chase leads through fog-choked diners and jazz dens throbbing with Dexter Gordon sax riffs, Isham’s motifs slither in: a theremin wail for the Dahlia’s spectral presence, percussive stabs underscoring chase scenes that devolve into farce (a pursuit through Chinatown’s herb shops ending in a tumble of dried ginseng). It’s Ennio Morricone by way of Philip Glass—minimalist loops building to orchestral crescendos that mimic the characters' unraveling psyches—but Isham can’t resist the kitsch. A love theme for Bucky and Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson, miscast as a breathy ingenue with daddy issues) swells with strings that drip like candle wax, all romantic yearning undercut by the on-screen reality of her character’s masochistic dalliances. When the Dahlia’s bisected form is discovered, Isham’s cue erupts in a cacophony of atonal brass and tolling bells, evoking Once Upon a Time in the West’s operatic violence, but the grandeur clashes hilariously with the cops' banal banter ("Jesus, Lee, she’s smiley-side up"). It’s as if Morricone scored a snuff film for the Marx Brothers—grand, grotesque, and gloriously over the top. Isham, drawing from Ellroy’s own soundscape obsessions (the author once described his writing as " bebop terror"), infuses the score with period jazz flourishes—Charlie Parker alto flurries for the hedonistic highs, Ellingtonian melancholy for the hangovers—but the result is less atmospheric immersion than a winking pastiche. You expect Sergio Leone’s dust devils; you get De Palma’s disco ball of dread. Production design, helmed by the Dante Ferretti— the Oscar-winning Italian virtuoso behind Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2011)—elevates the film’s camp quotient to delirious heights. Filmed largely in Sofia, Bulgaria (a cost-cutting ploy that saved Universal millions while dodging L.A.'s skyrocketing permits), Ferretti conjures a facsimile Cinecittà so opulent it’s obscene: art deco penthouses dripping with Murano chandeliers, speakeasies paneled in burled walnut and backlit by fox-fur silhouettes, mortuaries where porcelain bathtubs gleam like altars to vanity. The Dahlia’s crime scene, a weedy lot ringed by chain-link and oil derricks, is rendered with forensic poetry—chalk outlines blooming like chalk roses, the body’s halves splayed in mocking symmetry amid fluttering newsprint. Ferretti, no stranger to historical facsimile (his Titanic sets for Scorsese were labyrinths of Gilded Age excess), here fetishizes the era’s dualities: the glamour of the Mocambo nightclub, where starlets shimmy in beaded gowns under strobing spotlights, juxtaposed against the squalor of flop houses where hookers peddle flesh for fix money. One standout set, the Bauers' cliffside estate—a vertigo-inducing aerie of glass walls and infinity pools overlooking a faux-Pacific—doubles as necrophilic playground and Greek tragedy stage, where incestuous revelations unfold amid potted palms and Persian rugs stained with secrets. Ferretti shot in Bulgaria’s Barrandov Studios, trucking in period cars from vintage auctions and sourcing fabrics from Roman mills, but the artificiality bleeds through: a "Hollywood sign" hike that looks like a green-screen hike up the Apennines, rain machines drenching sets that scream "soundstage" louder than a bad ADR loop. It’s Cinecittà reborn in the Balkans—lavish, labored, and laughably unreal—turning De Palma’s noir into a Fellini farce where the sets are stars, outshining the flesh-and-blood players who writhe within them. And oh, the actors—god bless their valiant, vein-bulging efforts amid this juicy necrophilic fantasia. Hartnett’s Bucky is the fulcrum, a Golden Boy gumshoe whose arc from wide-eyed recruit to hollowed-out husk should anchor the chaos, but Hartnett (fresh off Pearl Harbor’s bombast and Sin City’s grit) plays him with the emotional range of a damp dishrag. His doe-eyed stares and mumbled line readings ("I see dead people… wait, wrong movie") evoke less tormented everyman than trust-fund slacker cosplaying Bogart. It’s unintentionally comic: watch him finger a Dahlia press clipping, his brow furrowed like a man solving quantum physics over a latte, and you snort at the pathos fail. Eckhart fares better as Lee, injecting shark-toothed charisma into the role of Bucky’s mentor-turned-madman; his descent into heroin haze and Dahlia fixation—culminating in a suicide that’s equal parts tragic and slapstick (he blows his brains out mid-confession, brains splattering like raspberry jam)—crackles with unhinged glee. Johansson’s Kay is a cipher in silk: all breathy whispers and bitten lips, her masochistic fire reduced to doe-eyed damselry that makes you yearn for the novel’s feral complexity. Hilary Swank, in a baffling accent that wobbles between Brooklyn and Budapest, embodies Madeleine Linscott, the Dahlia’s doppelgänger and socialite sadist; her scenes—straddling Bucky in a funereal gown, cooing incestuous nothings—drip with De Palma’s patented erotic menace, but Swank’s earnestness turns it campy, like a Method actress humping a taxidermied bear. The ensemble glitters with cameos: Mia Kirshner as the Dahlia herself, her brief screen time a ghostly striptease of bared midriffs and vacant stares; John Kavanagh as the porn baron Emmett, leering from a wheelchair like a Bond villain with a fetish for home movies; and Shaw’s Ramona, a whirlwind of maternal madness whose final monologue—delivered in a blood-spattered conservatory—lands like Joan Crawford in a blender. They suffer nobly, fucking and flailing in Ferretti’s fever-dream dioramas, but their exertions only heighten the farce: this is Grand Guignol played for guilty giggles, a cast adrift in a director’s wet dream who can’t decide if it’s requiem or romp. So why does it stick? Why, post-credits, does shame curdle into an itch to rewind, to plunge back into this atomic pizdets? Because The Black Dahlia is camp incarnate—unintentional, yes, but no less potent for it. Susan Sontag defined camp as "love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration," a worldview where style trumps content, failure becomes fabulous. De Palma’s film embodies this: its noir pretensions (the hardboiled voiceover, the rain-lashed betrayals) are undercut by excess so lavish it’s liberating. The parody isn’t mean-spirited; it’s affectionate, a middle finger to the genre’s solemnity that invites you to revel in the ridiculous. Bucky’s obsession with the Dahlia—mirroring Ellroy’s own—should be a portal to abyss, but Hartnett’s blank-slate blankness makes it a black comedy of inadequacy. The sex, shot with Zsigmond’s leering lens, isn’t titillating; it’s a send-up of Hollywood’s sex-as-spectacle, from von Sternberg’s Dietrich close-ups to Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct crotch-shots. Even the plot’s convolutions—twists piling on twists like a Jenga tower of red herrings—collapse into absurdity: the Dahlia’s killer revealed not through deduction but a deus ex machina family reunion that’s pure soap-opera schlock. It’s not faithful to Ellroy (the book ends in ambiguous fury; the film in tidy catharsis), but that’s the point—fidelity would neuter the madness. De Palma, the ultimate stylist, delivers a film that’s all surface: glossy, grotesque, and gloriously insincere. Contrast this with Fincher’s Mank, that 2020 Netflix behemoth which, in retrospect, feels like the anti-Dahlia: where De Palma wallows in the visceral, Fincher intellectualizes the void. Mank, penned by Fincher’s late father Jack (a former journalist and TV writer), chronicles screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz’s boozy battle to pen Citizen Kane (1941), framing it as a meta-meditation on Hollywood’s soul-sucking machinery. Shot in lustrous black-and-white by Erik Messerschmidt (echoing the novel’s 1940s milieu with digital precision), it’s a hermetic hall of mirrors: Mank (Gary Oldman, pickled and pugnacious) spars with Welles (Tom Burke, a spectral stand-in), Orson Hearst (Arliss Howard, all bluster and broken capillaries), and a chorus of Tinseltown titans—Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard again? Wait, no—Howard’s Hearst; it’s Ferdinand Kingsley as Irving Thalberg). The film posits Kane as Mank’s stolen thunder, a thesis as dry as a martini olive, all typewriter tantrums and cocktail-circuit catfights. Fincher’s touch—methodical, misanthropic, as in Se7en (1995) or Zodiac (2007)—turns it into a procedural of punctuation: endless montages of script revisions, intertitles quipping like Dorothy Parker’s barbs, a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that hums with minimalist menace. It’s about 1940s Hollywood, yes—the same decadent era as Dahlia—but sanitized: no eviscerations, no orgiastic underbellies, just the meta-meta grind of creation. Questions abound: Why the relentless cynicism toward Welles, painting him as a petulant boy-genius when history whispers collaboration? Why the anachronistic feminism in Amanda Seyfried’s Marion Davies, a wide-eyed ingenue spouting proto-#MeToo zingers? And the pacing—134 minutes that drag like a hangover—feels less like immersion than a lecture on authorship’s futility. Mank won Oldman an Oscar nod and a handful of tech awards, but it reeks of insider baseball: a film for cinephiles who alphabetize their Criterion Collection, not the rabid Ellroy fans craving blood and thunder. Fincher could’ve owned Dahlia—his Zodiac dissected obsession with surgical coldness, his Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) reveled in procedural porn—but Mank was his passion project, a filial elegy wrapped in celluloid theory. Eva Green as the Dahlia? Imagine her porcelain menace in Fincher’s frame: slow zooms into bisected beauty, Gary Oldman as Bucky unraveling in 8 mm grain. It would’ve been monolithic, merciless—a three-hour dirge where the meta yields to the meat. Instead, we got De Palma’s carnival of carnage, and damn if it doesn’t scratch that itch better. Back to Dahlia’s enduring drag: in a post-Tarantino landscape where pulp is king (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, 2019, riffed on the era with winking glee), De Palma’s film feels prophetic. It’s the ur-text of aughts excess, prefiguring the baroque bombast of The Neon Demon (2016) or the neo-noir fever of Under the Silver Lake (2018). The camp pulls you back because it’s cathartic: in a world of algorithm-fed blandness, who wouldn’t crave a film that dares to be this disastrously divine? Shame follows viewing—yes, for the dated gender politics (women as corpses or conquests), the racial blind spots (L.A.'s Black and Latino underclass as set dressing)—but that shame is the hook, a masochistic thrill akin to the characters' own fixations. Rewatch it alone, lights low, volume cranked, and let the absurdity wash over: Hartnett’s blank stare cracking into a grin you project onto him; Johansson’s whispers devolving into ASMR erotica; the final reveal, where family secrets erupt in a conservatory bloodbath that’s less shocking than a telenovela twist. It’s not good—hell, it’s barely coherent—but it’s alive, pulsing with the unholy energy of artists at play in the fields of the damned. De Palma, now 84 and semi-retired in Paris, has disowned it somewhat ("Too much plot," he grumbled in a 2010s interview), but that’s sour grapes; the film owns him, a scarlet letter of lavish lunacy. Ellroy, ever the contrarian, loathed it too ("A piece of shit," he barked), preferring his prose’s unyielding fury. Yet both men birthed a monster that’s more fun for its flaws—a black orchid that’s wilted, wondrous, and waiting to bloom again in your guilty queue. In the end, The Black Dahlia isn’t a film you respect; it’s one you surrender to, like a bad acid trip that ends in epiphany. It parodies noir not to mock it, but to resurrect it in garish glory, reminding us that the genre’s heart beats in the gutters, not the penthouses. Fincher’s Mank may dissect Hollywood’s machinery with scalpel precision, but De Palma vivisects it with a chainsaw, spraying viscera and vaudeville in equal measure. Questions linger for both—why the emotional aridity in Mank? Why the tonal whiplash in Dahlia? —but that’s cinema’s charm: the unanswered, the unresolvable, the atomic ache that demands another spin. So cue it up, dim the lights, and let the camp consume you. It’ll stain your soul, sure—but damn, it’ll sparkle.