It's After Your Sensibilities: "Body Double"
The legend goes that the initial screening of Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game in Paris in 1939 caused a riot in the theater. I was once told in a film class that people tore up their seats and threw them at the screen; close-fisted brawls have also been reported, and there is some indication that a member of the audience tried to set fire to the whole place.
The reason for this seems to be that the film offended their sensibilities. As patriotic French citizens on the eve a war, and believers in the nobility of French culture and the rightness of their society, the audience was not disposed to enjoy a film that – even with the lightest touch – suggested that there might be something rotten in Sologne, as it were.
That cinema was the medium through which this suggestion was delivered – and here I stray even further into the realm of speculation – may be the element that turned this dispute away from animated conversations in the lobby and toward an attempt to sack the building and cudgel one another.
Movies, then and now, bear as great a concentration of "high" and "low" elements (in a formulation beloved by a critic friend of mine, who once wanted to start a rock 'n roll and film magazine called "High/Low") as any art form. They are a "low" form in that many of them are aimed at the broadest possible audience, and in that their force can come from so many blunt elements; it's not a coincidence that film-based propaganda is so successful.
They are a "high" form in that (even excluding things like video installations at museums) they allow for such delicate, even abstruse expression, such that they can support vast bodies of scholarly thought, "theory," and folks who spend their lives sitting in classrooms talking about them.
Which is to say that people love movies in a passionate way, and feel possessive of them. They are "ours." They are a public joy. At the same time (and perhaps even because of this) they avail people like Renoir the opportunity for all kinds of sly multi-layered thinking, or expressing, on what can be fairly cerebral topics, such as the forms of class and privilege in French society. This high/low quality can make them particularly infuriating, or particularly delightful, depending on where you stand on the matters at hand.
There are, of course, certain inanities involved in comparing The Rules of the Game to Brian De Palma's Body Double from 1984, but I think the comparison helps bring out one of the most interesting things about the latter film's provocations. Where Renoir's movie plays with notions of the society surrounding the audience, De Palma's plays with something perhaps even more infuriating: the audience's participation in – and love for – the very things the film uses to offend them.
Body Double opens with a crane shot showing a creepy graveyard; the camera moves back and descends slowly below the earth to find a vampire lying in a coffin. He opens his eyes and turns to stare directly at us – then freezes. A director's voice becomes audible, and people rush forward to help the vampire, who is not a vampire at all.
He's Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), a struggling L.A. actor playing a vampire in an indy horror film being put on by a harried and unscrupulous director named Rubin (Dennis Franz). Jake suffers from claustrophobia, which gets him fired from Rubin's movie; he also finds out that afternoon that his girlfriend has been cheating on him. Distraught and with nowhere to live, Jake stumbles into what seems like a perfect opportunity. A friend of a friend, an actor named Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry), has been house-sitting an outrageous pad in the Hollywood Hills: it's shaped like a flying saucer, raised up on stilts, and looks out over the entire city. Sam has to go to Seattle for a play – maybe Jake would like to stay in this house and take care of the plants?
Jake accepts the offer happily, and then Sam reveals the other perk: there is a woman in a house down the street who does a kind of erotic dance routine at the same time every night, and by looking through a telescope you can watch. Her face is always obscured by the shadows, but her naked body is not. Jake, lovelorn and also somewhat repressed, does watch. And on the second night, he notices something amiss. An electrical repairman with a terribly scarred face is on a nearby stanchion, watching too. And from this man's expression, it does not look like he has good intentions.
The next day, driving back to his spaceship abode, Jake sees the woman from the house – named Gloria Revelle, played by Deborah Shelton – leaving her driveway in her car...and then sees the man with the scarred face following her. Worried, or perhaps becoming obsessed with the object of his erotic voyeurism, Jake follows as well.
Gloria's on her way to an extra-marital tryst, and Jake tails her first to a mall where she buys a new pair of underwear, and then to the beachside hotel where her lover is to meet her. The lover doesn't show, but the man with the scarred face does. This man snatches Gloria's purse, and Jake pursues him down the beach into a tunnel beneath the freeway, where Jake's claustrophobia kicks in, paralyzing him again. The man steels some sort of card from the purse but drops the rest, and Gloria's thankful to Jake for recovering it. They engage in a sudden and absurdly intimate make-out session.
That night, Jake again watches through the telescope, but this time he sees something very different. The scarred man has used the electronic security card he stole to sneak into Gloria's house, and is breaking into a safe in her bedroom with a huge drill. When Gloria surprises him, the man attacks her. Jake sprints down the street to try to save her, but is attacked by Gloria’s dog. Upstairs, the man kills Gloria with the drill.
Distraught, and accused by the police of being a peeping tom who could have prevented the murder if he would have alerted them, Jake finds himself drowning his sorrows in whisky and watching ads for pornographic movies on late-night TV. And in one of those ads, he sees something very strange indeed: an adult actress named Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) doing a dance that he recognizes as the one he was watching through the telescope.
Realizing something's amiss, Jake auditions for a role in a porn film opposite Holly. He gets the part – the film opens with a musical number set to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax" – and uses it as a way to question Holly about the dance routine.
Holly admits that a guy hired her to go to the house and do the dance; Jake realizes it was never Gloria he was watching at all. The whole thing was set up by Sam, as a way to make Jake into a witness for the wrong crime. In reality, Sam is Gloria's husband. What Jake told the cops was a scarred man committing a burglary was actually Sam in disguise, murdering his wife so he could inherit her wealth.
The film ends with Holly falling into Sam’s clutches and Jake rescuing her. In the process, he overcomes his claustrophobia, which allows him to win back the part in Ruben's vampire film. The final sequence shows Jake dressed up as the vampire again, acting in a scene in which a body double is brought in. He bites her neck and fondles her breasts, which are the last things we see.
The plot here – an open riff on both the plot of Hitchcock's Vertigo and the topic of his Rear Window – is convoluted, wonderful, and blatantly unrealistic. But sensationalism rather than realism is exactly the point. The film is as much about film itself as it is about our world; or perhaps better to say that it's about the relationship between our world and film more than it is about either.
That Body Double takes as its topic sexual voyeurism is obvious. Not only does Jake watch Holly – who he thinks is Gloria – through the telescope, the dialogue and visuals also push us in this direction. The script for the porn film Jake and Holly act in has her saying to him: "You like to watch, don't you." Jake spends a good deal of time watching Gloria in person as well – peeping on her through a shop window as she tries on underwear – and watching the scarred man watch her. And the film is filled with other moments and images of looking, like the scene in which Jake sees his girlfriend in bed with another man, and the one in which Sam looks at Jake and Holly through a pair of binoculars while they're figuring out the murder plot.
But there is a second layer here, saucily announced by De Palma through the use of movies within a movie. The opening shot, you'll recall features Jake as a vampire, staring frozen into the camera. It presents us from the jump with the idea of looking, and wraps this in the cinematic monster that is the most closely associated with sexuality and predation against women. Vampire movies have long been vehicles for at their best exploring the vagaries of sexual desire, and at their worst titillating the audience with gauzily photographed young female victims.
This notion is then paralleled by the second movie within a movie, which is a porn film. Body Double that is, wants clearly to make a connection between voyeurism and cinema itself, here represented by vampire movies and pornographic movies. In both those genres, the male audience gets off by watching what happens on the screen; the violence of the one is by implication also happening in the other.
The final step in this provocation is of course the implication of the viewers of Body Double themselves. At some point in the proceedings we become aware that what we are watching is the same as the films within in a film that we have been watching the making of. As with the other elements here, De Palma is not so much subtle as goading. When Jake and Holly talk after shooting the porn scene, he notes proudly that the idea for the mirror in the film was his. In the shot he's referencing they appear in a mirrored door; when this swings shut our camera stays on it, showing us the movie camera that’s filming Jake and Holly. We’re looking in a mirror at a film camera, meaning we’re seeing our own reflection.
A second way the movie suggests this is through its repetitive use of artificiality. Several times when Jake is driving we see behind the windows of his car what are clearly rear-projection images (the kind of thing familiar from older films, when the actors sit in a fake car "driving" in front of a landscape projected onto a screen). These are not used throughout: it’s obvious that De Palma is after something by showing them to us.
Similarly, when Jake and Gloria kiss after the purse-snatching chase, we fall into a kind of Hollywood irreality, a send-up of romance: the camera rotates around them as they descend into a weirdly overripe passion. And when Jake dances into the porn shoot to "Relax," what we are seeing is indistinguishable from an '80s music video. The point is, I think, exactly to make us aware that what we are watching is not reality but an art form in which is heightened for the purpose of stimulating us.
The final sequence in the film works to cap this all off. In showing us how the body double is substituted for the other actress in Ruben's lascivious vampire movie, De Palma is reminding us that what we've been being titillated by – sex and violence – is made for that purpose by people using film technique on sets, who are constructing it as a part of their working life: the body double warns Jake in his vampire makeup to be gentle when he fondles her breasts because she's having her period and is extremely sensitive. What is being built here, in other words, is a carefully constructed fantasy, designed to pull us in through desire; De Palma would like to rub our face in its less savory ramifications.
Too abstract, you say? To high-art thinky? Then consider the sequence in which Gloria is killed by the scarred man with a huge drill. He chases her around with the drill until she falls, then stands over her to commit the murder. There is a bed in the foreground.
To call this image, and the sequence itself, intentionally phallic would perhaps be to understate the case. De Palma is insisting that the titillation we feel in films like this one is inherently tied to male violence, and male sexuality. In watching this kind of stuff, that is, we are participating in a sexually-oriented violence toward women. To return to the idea from the beginning, if Renoir was provoking his audience by turning their beloved art form into a critique of the society they believed in, De Palma is here provoking his audience by suggesting that their beloved art form is a repository of terrible and damaging transgressions, and that they are implicated in that horror by their act of viewing.
And yet.
Isn't De Palma doing all of this in a movie that participates in exactly the kind of thing it critiques? Of course. As he has throughout his career, he’s playing the scoundrel rather than the scold. Having his cake and eating it. Dancing around and poking us in our sensitive parts with a sharp ironic stick. This is the essence of provocation, and it’s what separates art from morality. It's exactly the reason one should be so careful with the assertion that films "argue" things. Art is far more complex than argument.
One of the most fascinating ironies of Body Double is that Jake is at the start an emasculated character. His girlfriend is cheating on him and he's beset by a crippling psychological condition that prevents him from, ahem, performing. By the end of the film he has conquered his claustrophobia and won the girl (Holly is present, presumably as his girlfriend, at the final vampire movie shoot): he's now capable of performing his role both as a lover and as an actor.
And how has he accomplished this? By descending into the world of pornography. By participating in the objectification of the woman he must save. By doing exactly what the film seems to want to make us conscious of. He’s been saved by sin.
The point is not to teach us a lesson, or to make us feel guilty for watching, or to make us feel clever for "getting it." The point is to stir us up, to provoke us, to make us feel like throwing our chairs through the screen, or burning down the theater, or perhaps more gently to make us want to engage in extended discussions in the lobby afterwards, trying to puzzle it all out.
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