| Rad Movies: Brian De Palma’s “Body Double” |
There was a moment in the mid-80s when Brian De Palma found himself in a personal and artistic crisis. His marriage to Dressed to Kill and Blow Out star Nancy Allen had dissolved after attacks from the press– people wanting to know why he was so intent on casting her in sexually exploitative roles, and how he could write her into such grisly deaths. He had faced a drawn-out battle with the MPAA over whether to give Scarface an ‘X’ rating, only to see the film subsequently ridiculed for its graphic content by nearly every major critic. From this low point, De Palma decided to strike back at the pantheon of amateur ethicists with an over-the-top film that threatened to reach unprecedented levels of depravity.  Body Double is a thriller that, perhaps to spite to his critics from yet another direction, recycles the Hitchcockian plot devices that some had derided him for stealing (missing the point entirely) in Sisters, Obsession, and Dressed to Kill. Without giving too much away, a harmless peeping tom is witness to a grisly murder, but, as in Vertigo, the film’s tagline informs us, “You can’t believe everything you see.” At the same time, Body Double is a hilarious pastiche of trashy ’80s sex-and-gore slasher films, and an over-the-top portrait of Hollywood excess– including space-age bachelor bads, unreal shopping malls, and impromptu porn-set musical numbers. Seriously, it’s goofy. And radical.  De Palma must have been surprised that audiences didn’t understand his grand vision, that they weren’t able to look past his endlessly convoluted plot and unannounced forays into the surreal, to see the heavily layered intertextual references and more importantly, the subtext about what it means to watch a movie. However, any way you approach Body Double proves entertaining: as a brilliant commentary on film, voyeurism, and De Palma himself; as a loony piece of pop culture nonsense; or as both at the same time.  Also, it’s endearing and quaint to see what Roger Ebert (and maybe ostensibly, the rest of America?) found shocking and saddening in 1985: “The speech in which [Melanie Griffith] explains exactly what she will, and will not, do in a movie is shocking, sad, and curiously moving.” The aforementioned speech, which reads almost like the text of a lucid spam e-mail: “I do not do animal acts. I do not do S&M, or any variations of that particular bent. Uh, no water sports, either. I will not shave my pussy. No fist fucking, and absolutely no cumming in my face.” More on Body Double: |
Thanks for introducing this amazing film. I never had the courage to rent it as a young man. The cover made me think it was to racy.
But is Craig Wasson not the lamest leading man, like, ever? Seriously, he’s like watered-down Bill Maher.
Yes, but it’s all part of De Palma’s pat-himself-on-the-back master plan– a “bad actor” playing an actor no one can believe. He is repeatedly told by other characters to “Act! Act!!” and chastized for being melodramatic. Very funny, Mr. De Palma, you’re so brilliant!