Body Double
De Palma’s affectionate nods are just crass, unimaginative and bordering if not outright crossing over into plagiarism.
Grade: F+
Brian De Palma’s 1984 erotic thriller is a cinematic mutant grown from DNA stolen from De Palma’s heroes and gorged to death on De Palma’s superficial excess.
De Palma has a reputation for copying his favourite filmmakers and it’s well-deserved. Sometimes, it’s through affectionate cameos. Carrie White’s school in Carrie is named after Norman Bates, Carlito Brigante describes his job as “playing Humphrey Bogart” in his club and Ethan Hunt gets visually trapped in a phone booth in Mission: Impossible like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. At other times, De Palma’s affectionate nods are just crass, unimaginative and bordering if not outright crossing over into plagiarism. Body Double is one of those times. It stars Craig Wasson as Jake Scully. Scully’s a struggling LA actor looking for a rental after he comes home and finds his girlfriend getting another man laid. An acting acquaintance finds him a comfy place to housesit. The house bears a striking resemblance to the mushroom tower in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (De Palma used Antonioni’s Blow Up as the basis for his film Blow Out) and what Scully does next apes two heroes of Hitchcock’s films. He starts spying on his neighbour. His neighbour’s a rich lady who likes to dance naked in front of her window every night before masturbating. Scully becomes a peeper as LB Jeffries did in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. He’s also spying on a lonely woman trapped in a solipsistic romantic fantasy, but Scully’s neighbour is far kinkier than Ms Lonely Hearts. Unlike Ms Lonely Hearts, Scully’s neighbour, named Gloria and played by Deborah Shelton, is married but it’s an abusive one. Scully gets concerned about Gloria and starts following her like Jimmy Stewart’s Scotty followed Kim Novak’s Madeleine, and De Palma stops imitating Hitchcock’s Rear Window and starts imitating Vertigo.
There’s always suspense in any story when a man’s following someone he’s not supposed to be following or watching someone he’s not supposed to be watching, but there’s still the fact that De Palma is just doing what Hitchcock did and not as well. Scotty and Madeleine walked and talked enough to fall in love in Vertigo as did Jeffries and Lisa in Rear Window but Scully only talks to Gloria once. When Scully’s following Gloria and helplessly watching her be murdered from his window, what’s at stake for him isn’t love but a horny fantasy.
The whole film is something of a horny fantasy of De Palma’s. He imitates his idols while touching his plagiarism up with his own cheap imaginings like how Andy Warhol copied the images of celebrities and splashed some paint on them. Gloria’s murderer is a Native American with a face like a reject from a monster movie and he kills her with a power drill. Despite what you may think, that part of the film is actually quite easy to watch. It’s not as graphic as it sounds, but why a power drill? It’s too big and too fiddly to be a murder weapon and the killer finds this out when he accidentally pulls the power plug out of the wall socket and has to plug it back in.
The sex is harder to watch than the violence. So I’m not accused of being prudish, there is one scene where De Palma makes sex work. It’s the second scene. Scully comes home from work early, walks around his apartment looking for his girlfriend, opens the bedroom door, and finds her naked and on top of another man and crying out in orgasmic ecstasy. It’s shocking but it’s shocking for Scully. It’s as blatant and confronting for you as it is for Scully. This is one of the few sex scenes I’ve seen in film that actually works but in Body Double it’s the exception rather than the rule.
Scully’s subsequent descent into the world of X-rated films is littered with bare butts and breasts being fumbled and waved about. It’s an utterly unsophisticated use of sex, unlike what De Palma did with Ethan Hunt and Claire’s relationship in Mission: Impossible and the teen sex in Carrie. There the sex was hidden and became more tantalising through being kept below the surface. It’s what Hitchcock would have done. I read an article once saying that De Palma does what Hitchcock would have if he hadn’t been confined by the Hayes Code. I don’t agree. Hitchcock wouldn’t have shown Cary Grant topping Eve Marie Saint in the train compartment in North By Northwest even without the Hayes Code. He knew that suggestion was more powerful than anything he could explicitly show. De Palma on the other hand is a slave to the explicit in Body Double. He puts in too much sex and too much violence and blows them all up to grotesque proportions until it’s like being clobbered with a dead fish.
How could Brian De Palma, the director who made films as subtle and suspenseful as Carrie and Carlito’s Way, could make a film as nakedly crass as Body Double? That’s a mystery that will haunt me until I find the answer.