"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; the act turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time." ― Susan Sontag
Today's fad is often tomorrow's joke, but Brian De Palma's "Body Double" is something else entirely. The film was treated as a "serious", "vulgar" and "pornographic" thriller when it was released. Flash forward several decades, though, with audiences now desensitised to sex and violence, and "Double" reveals itself to be totally hilarious, a far cry from the more conservative blockbusters of the 1980s.
The plot? Craig Wasson plays Jake Scully, a B-movie actor who finds himself struggling to film a scene in a coffin. Whilst director Alfred Hitchcock had Jimmy Stewart suffer from vertigo in "Vertigo", De Palma has Scully suffer from claustrophobia, both men unable to perform due to their respective phobias.
This is where De Palma begins to hit us with various levels of self-reference: Scully, a struggling actor within the film, is played by Craig Wasson, a struggling actor in real life. De Palma then has Wasson act intentionally cheesy (his character can only win roles in B-movies), whilst also mimicking James Stewart in "Vertigo". In a filmography of clueless heroes, Scully is thus De Palma's most comical, always out of place and always radiating a goofy sense of decency.
The film then reveals itself to be obsessed with doubles and doppelgangers, each character imbued with a second persona. And so De Palma will have "friends" turn out to be "villains", "neighbours" turn out to be "porn stars" and have his two major female characters turn out to be "doubles of doubles", as they themselves mimic Kim Novak's dual character in "Vertigo". Even minor characters (Scully's wife/boss/mentor etc) exhibit 180-degree turns in personality.
This being De Palma, the film is also a giant thesis on Hitchcock. On the superficial side, De Palma uses proudly goofy rear screen projection (an allusion to Hitch's over-reliance on the technique), names Scully after "Vertigo's" Scotty, uses comically lush music and has Melanie Griffith, daughter of Tippi Hedren ("Birds", "Marnie" etc), play a key role.
More significantly, De Palma rips 3 sequences right out of Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and "Vertigo", pushing them to their sleazy, logical conclusions. So instead of Jimmy Stewart stalking Kim Novak, we get Scully stalking a woman in a mall, stealing her panties and spying as she changes her clothes. Similarly, instead of Stewart watching his murderous male neighbour with binoculars, we get Scully spying on his sexy female neighbour as she dances naked. Finally, instead of Hitchcock's camera circling Novak and Stewart as they kiss, we get De Palma's camera giddily circling Scully and Deborah Shelton as he fondles her exposed bra.
These sequences don't only tease out the dark underbellies of Hitchcockian voyeurism, though, but ask us to consider the relationships between voyeurism, desire, manipulation and violence. De Palma makes this clearest when he has his hero "watch" a porn movie after a "female neighbour" dies, one fantasy woman essentially replacing the other. Unable to "look", or even "kill", in real life, Scully thus immediately seeks out decontexualised voyeurism/violence via film and television, the real life fantasy immediately traded for the mediated, surrogate fantasy. De Palma symbolises this link by cross cutting between Scully's fantasy lovemaking with his neighbour and the actual raw sex he has with a porn star, as illusion and reality merge in a literal climax.
A film-within-a-film sequence, in which Scully encounters Melanie Griffith dancing and tells her that he "likes to watch" her, itself becomes an X rated parody of De Palma's "Body Double", in which Scully "likes to watch his neighbour", which is itself a soft core parody of Hitchcock, a director whom De Palma "likes to watch". All three levels of fantasy are linked with Hitchcock's famous 360-camera pan, a move which, for both directors, often signifies obsession.
Early in the film, during an actors workshop session in which Scully recounts a tale of being trapped behind a fridge (the birth of his claustrophobia), a teacher yells "You've got to act!", the implication being that Scully can only conquer his fears through acting. Scully then "dies" at the end of the film and is miraculously "brought back to life" by the "power of acting", role-playing essentially giving him the confidence to conquer his phobias. For De Palma, the distance or detachment afforded by film, voyeurism etc, allows us to participate in mediated fantasies which we would ordinarily be too timid to directly participate in. Film allows us our own body doubles, our own avatars, and through them we then learn how to desire.
Other neat scenes abound: De Palma treats us to a "Relax, Don't Do It!" music video sequence, a soft-core parody of a scene in "An American in Paris", which anticipates the Coen Brothers and Tarantino by a solid decade. The film also begins and ends with deliberate deconstructions, tricking the audience into accepting scenes at face value and then breaking down the reality of a film set's goings on. And as is typical of De Palma, special attention is paid to architecture. De Palma loves modernist buildings, his camera gliding down corridors, up stairs and along walls. Here he uses John Lautner's famous Chemosphere house, LA's Farmer's Market Mall and a interesting looking terraced apartment complex by the beach.
8.9/10 – Probably the cheesiest avant-garde film ever made.
