Window the kind of modernist use of the frame that Antonioni introduced six years later, in L'Avventura " (p. 78). And -- in a breathtaking display of non-familiarity with an auteur's work -- he deduces that, when one critic lists the positive values of cinema as "logical, realistic, scrupulous, earnest, and funny", this critic, it must be assumed, "means Jean Renoir" (41). Rules of the Game , anyone? The mistakes might be small fry, and the bully-nerd opinions might be fluffily dispensable [2] , but they add up, I'm afraid, to a very trustworthy indication of the level, tone and consistency of the book's main thrust. Here, we need to step back to take stock of what it is, exactly, that Un-American Psycho believes itself to be doing. It is a book with two central subjects, one of which tends to disappear inside the other. The first, disappearing subject is De Palma -- and I will instantly declare that I consider him to be a great and highly significant filmmaker. (Dumas thinks something similar, but the nature of that something will be addressed later.) The second, overriding subject is Film Studies itself as a discipline, specifically in its "anglophone [sic] wing" (3) -- although the Anglophone world quickly closes down, for Dumas, into America, and furthermore an America conceived in an oddly predatory way. The geo-politics of Un-American Psycho are resolutely ghastly. (In a telling footnote on p. 46, Dumas tries to foreclose on any reading whatsoever of his book