“Welcome to Peeping Toms, New York’s newest and grooviest game!”
– Brian De Palma, “Sisters”
“You know your dick was hard the entire time,” Quentin Tarantino once accused of Stanley Kubrick. It was in response to how Kubrick maintained that “A Clockwork Orange” was a powerful statement of anti-violence and took no pleasure in its graphic acts of mayhem and assault. For Tarantino–among the most rabid Brian De Palma superfans–that is pure hypocrisy. To him, films are exercises in fetish and kink at 24 frames per second. Movie directors, like Tony Montana, get high on their own supply. In its 40th year, “Body Double,” one of De Palma’s most underloved masterpieces, is a film that still knows how to get the audience (and its director) off.
Although a disaster at release, “Body Double” was the incredible climax to a decade of movies that were both carnivorously violent and erotically charged, a smut-thriller renaissance that saw cinematic classics remade into beautifully grotesque palimpsestic pop-art. “Psycho” was transformed into the alluringly lurid “Sisters” and “Dressed to Kill,” “Vertigo” into “Obsession,” Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” into “Blow Out.” It is a legendary run, born from a Godardian act of love: for De Palma to honor his influences, he must consume and destroy them, like throwing fuschia-pink paint on the Mona Lisa after obsessing over every brush stroke.
Critics were frequently scandalized, and audiences seldom showed up, with De Palma labeled as a style-over-substance vulgarist and provocateur. Yet these films, “Body Double” most of all, were pure New Hollywood, equal parts reverence and rejection, all exposed flesh and shimmering artifice, lacquered in the illusory meta-nature of film cocked to extremis. And in the film that completed this wave of De Palma’s career, “Body Double” becomes an unlikely prayer for the healing power of film itself, a vortex of whirlpooling artifice, sex, and ultraviolence that, if entered, can save broken souls, including his own.
Speaking to Noah Baumbach in the 2015 documentary about his career, De Palma recalls, “I had carte blanche to make this movie, and it was all great until they saw it.” “Body Double” was made in the fallout of financial failures and frustration, cashing in on the recent success of “Scarface” to make an impossible “how did this get made” miracle of a pervert cinema. After years of feeling chewed out by Hollywood, De Palma channeled the anti-establishment anger of his earlier political documentaries into a psychosexual autocritique of himself and his career, as well as a bracing satire of show business and the ghouls inside it. Or, as crime novelist Megan Abbott wrote, “His movies thus become conspicuous, gaudy spectacles of male anxiety and lust, orgies of panicked masculinity in the face of the powerful female.”
“Body Double” is the ultimate expression of that theme. Over the last decade, De Palma had a rough run: “Carrie” was a hit, but the Travolta-starring “Blow Out” (a masterwork of paranoia) cost more than “Star Wars” and flopped. He’d just finished a fraught battle with the MPAA over the rating on “Scarface,” and was licking his wounds from a tough divorce with Nancy Allen, his creative muse since “Carrie.”
It was under that industry heat that “Body Double” was born, daring not only to remake one Hitchcock classic but two: a twisted double-bill of “Rear Window” and “Vertigo,” reconceptualized through the pop-kitsch prism of MTV and the lubed backrooms of 1980s hardcore porn. Take the opening scene, with De Palma’s camera panning through an imitation graveyard, tilting into an underground coffin to reveal a bleach-blonde vampire, collared in the couture of S&M. He’s staring at the camera, at us, and we quickly realize something is wrong: a frozen fourth wall break, his fangs and crimson lipstick are unable to move. And then we hear, “Action, Jake. Jake, action…okay cut!” and see a bustling film set.
We were watching Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), a struggling actor. He, like “Scottie” in “Vertigo,” has a crippling psychological flaw. Instead of a dolly-zoomed fear of heights, Jake suffers from debilitating claustrophobia, and he discovers it while shooting the low-rent horror flick “Vampire’s Kiss,” risking ruin to his career. The director tells him to take the rest of the day off, a smiling backstab to fire Jake from the horror picture–the first sign of De Palma’s festering anger towards Hollywood.
This beginning sequence is a fever-dreamed meta-commentary not only on the rest of the movie but the nature of cine-artifice itself. It also recalls the opening of “Blow Out,” another De Palma picture that begins with a film within a film, both movies tricking us into the illusion we’re watching low-grade horror pictures, satirical jabs at the kind of movies De Palma was accused of making. More importantly, they show a sudden branching of one cinematic world penetrating another, an idea reinforced again and again through “Body Double.” This includes even the title card, first revealing a western horizon, only to be then exposed as a matte painting wheeled away into the studio backlot. Should this matte backdrop seem any less “real” because, diegetically, we were shown it was fake when it isn’t any more or less illusory and authentic than when we first saw it? The riddle of suspension of disbelief is a tricky thing, and “Body Double” is a feature-long play on the idea, driving into a climax that turns these tricks into entire setpieces and structural games.
Jake is an unusual protagonist for De Palma, an ineffectual cuckold expertly played with controlled loser energy by Wasson. He finds his girlfriend sleeping with another man, kickstarting a deviously labyrinthian plot that, like Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” has a bifurcated structure that begins to deconstruct itself self-reflexively. But now, Jake’s on the lookout for a new place to live, leading him to Sam Bouchard, who traps him in a murder scheme. Jake’s invited to house sit while Bouchard is out of town, a real-life house that looks like a UFO on stilts (another example of movie artifice intruding on reality), and Bouchard prompts him to peer through the home’s mounted binoculars.
What he sees is a woman of aphroditic beauty, erotically dancing in topless striptease to the fluttering synths of Pino Donaggio’s “Telescope” before sprawling over her bed to touch herself. As Jake gazes through the binoculars, the image shifts in and out of focus, as though the lens is in aroused dilation, expressing Jake’s instant, intense infatuation in visual terms. It’s a sign of “Body Double’s” growing appreciation that this scene has become iconic, with Ben Affleck’s “Air” borrowing the theme while The Weeknd references it in the “Is There Someone Else?” music video, De Palma’s perversity on the rise.
This spectacle of body and movement ignites Jake’s obsession with his voyeured subject, a woman we soon learn is Gloria Revelle–or a woman dressed to look like her–and he is entranced. For Jake, Gloria is the ideal sexual object, flattened and depersonalized, observed from a safe, riskless distance, what film theorist Laura Mulvey called “the leit-motif of erotic spectacle.” Jake can’t smell the setup and becomes an unwitting accomplice in her death, kinked-up bait for Bouchard, secretly Gloria’s husband, to use Jake for a perfect alibi. The next night, Jake realizes he’s not her only audience. He spots “The Indian,” Bouchard in disguise, inhabiting a racist role as a violent Native American, another “body double,” one of the film’s many, another meta-attack from De Palma on Hollywood. And it’s the perfect pretense for Jake to “protect,” follow, and stalk Gloria, shrinking their distance.
“Body Double” is a playful modulation in style for De Palma, at once among his most garishly over-the-top and straightforwardly pared-down movies. Gone are his eye-catching split screens, flashy crane shots, and dynamic composites, and he rarely uses a Steadicam. The palette of the first hour pushes neutral browns and beige, and he mostly withholds his split diopters for key moments. One comes as Jake follows Gloria to the Rodeo Collection mall, the convexed glass collapsing the distance between peeping tom and subject into one space. De Palma limiting his cinematic toy kit captures the essence of Jake’s flat, limp personality. Still, it also primes “Body Double’s” eruptions of hallucinatory artifice: the camera woozing in a tunnel during a claustrophobic episode chasing “The Indian,” a tornadoing 360-degree rear-projection shot around Gloria and Jake’s beachside embrace, restaging the seaside kiss in “Vertigo.”
It’s here that “Body Double” is split in two, cleaved apart by Gloria’s death. Bouchard, still as “The Indian,” kills his wife with a dizzyingly large, corkscrewed power drill. De Palma and co-writer Robert J. Avrech insisted that the violent phallic imagery was a tactical filmmaking choice so that Jake, still across the street, could see the weapon, but they’re nuts; De Palma choreographs Bouchard to kill her by hoisting the spinning power drill between his legs as he descends upon her struck body, a Freudian weapon if there ever was one. That this is the film’s centerpiece is another double-edged device, simultaneously everything De Palma’s detractors target him for doing–a phallocentric act of extreme violence against a woman–and also a rebuff of it. We never actually see the violence on screen, “Psycho” with industrial machinery, using Hitchcock to help deconstruct his strained reputation.
Boozed and watching late TV porn, Jake discovers a shocking revelation: an advert for Holly Body (played with mesmerizing ferocity and allure by Melanie Griffith) comes on the screen, the hardcore star of “Holly Does Hollywood,” the “Gone with the Wind of Adult Films,” and she dances. She dances the same erotic moves as Gloria, and Jake realizes he’s been the likely victim of an elaborate con job. And so, he does the sensible thing: with slicked back hair and an outfit of leather on leather, he goes undercover, playing as a porn star and producer, hoping to find Holly and uncover the truth it was really her dancing, the one-way foreplay on a 3x lens.
It’s from here that “Body Double” descends from any conventional boundaries of taste, a ne plus ultra into the gutter-shlock of porn, ironically the best and only path De Palma could have taken. Gene Siskel, along with voluminous other critics, condemned this direction as sordid and gross, yet to explore the blurred boundaries of film and artifice, porno is the ideal destination: it is a form of filmic media where the divide between the illusory and the real breaks down, where performance is also physical action, somatic fantasy. Porn is both fantasy and physical, the bodies as both the props and acting instrument, aestheticizing sex and performance for peak arousal, the friction between the real and unreal pushed to fervid extremes.
So it makes perfect sense, then, that it’s in entering the world of porn that Jake’s sense of reality explodes, and from then to the end of “Body Double,” he slides from one cinematic reality to another, a stargate of kink. This begins with the iconic “Just Do It” musical set-piece, filmed as a promotional music video with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and hilariously used in-film by De Palma for one of Holly’s porn shoots. But for Jake, it’s a Hollywood-Hardcore Dreamland, where it not only stops being clear what’s “real” or not, but the question itself fades, hearing only the repeated chorus of “Relax (don’t do it), when you wanna go to it.” He sees it’s in this imagined, impossible space that his perversity is finally embraced and celebrated, the costumed dancers leading Jake towards a pink tiger-print proscenium with the title “SLUTS,” an invitation to perform. Jake enters, and it’s here he meets Holly, adorned in spiked bleach-blonde hair and S&M leather, the body-doubled female id of himself in “Vampire’s Kiss.”
As the door swings open and shut, the camera crew is visible for the second time, briefly looking at us, but unlike the opening sequence where that Brechtian dynamite fragmented reality, here that dreamworld is sustained; Jake confesses, “I like to watch” and Holly reciprocates, and as Jake has sex with Holly on camera, he has finally suspended disbelief in his own fantasy, and in that process, finds his most authentic self. He is giving the best performance of his career, method acting, enraptured with her body, sparking flashes of his earlier kiss with Gloria, the camera hypnotically spiraling around them, Holly and Gloria as one, his split sexualized personas in ecstatic freefall.
He forgets what he’s there to do, he forgets that he’s only “acting,” and he climaxes, consummating his new sense of self. This experience heals Jake, a psychosexual exorcism, so when Bouchard, still in disguise, attacks him and Holly, he flashes back to the opening scene’s film set and back again, an ouroboric climax, the end swallowing the beginning. He’s able to fight through his claustrophobia, he’s able to defeat “The Indian,” he’s able to save Holly, and he’s impossibly able to get his job back on “Vampire’s Kiss.” And in a break from “Vertigo,” he gets a happy ending, where he and Holly become a couple, his “cure” the byproduct of a post-modernization interrogation of the movieness of movies, where emotion can transcend logic or plot.
It takes a certain kind of exhibitionist mania to make a foundational element of your popular art the most intimate of private fetishes. That fetish, of course, is voyeurism: the desire, the need, to illicitly gaze at that which is private and ought to be unseen. Voyeurism is not just subtext for De Palma’s films but their subject and their MacGuffin, their beginning and their end.
The plots of De Palma regularly burn on the act of licentious looking (”Sisters” is set in motion by a nosy neighbor spotting a murder, “Blow Out” by a sound designer, “Femme Fatale” by a paparazzi), and “Body Double” is powered by De Palma’s deep belief of widespread perversion, that any down-on-his-luck guy would gaze, obsessively, at a nude woman dancing.
At this stage, if not sooner, it becomes easy to see Jake as a stand-in, a body double, for De Palma himself. The signs of this connection vibrate through “Body Double,” from how they both suffered painful breakups from their romantic partners to the Hollywood systems that betrayed them. They also love, need, to watch. Consider the multitude of scenes where “the suits” add to Jake’s humiliation for his pervert fetishes and kinks, proxies for studio executives or even film critics. Most revealing is the origin of Jake’s claustrophobia, a game of sardine gone wrong with his siblings, an autobiographical detail from De Palma’s own childhood.
So maybe, then, it wasn’t just Jake, but also De Palma, who needed his lascivious desires accepted and nourished rather than harshly policed and ridiculed. Maybe “Body Double,” De Palma’s great cinematic pleasure palace, allowed him to project his most truthful self through the conduit of this weak, ineffectual man who rediscovers his strength and fortitude by falling into dreams of artifice.