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ACF #31: Body Double
The podcast’s going back to Brian De Palma. My friend John Presnall and I are going to defend, from a conservative point of view, De Palma’s most indefensible sex and violence movie, Body Double. De Palma makes porn the mirror of Hollywood (the underground of Hollywood) and brings Hitchcock into the ’80s, with all the new scandals, but the same moralistic intention: Showing how society hides from evil and perpetuates it. De Palma criticizes the all-American ambition for success and popularity in order to defend man’s heroism. However vulgar, we all want to be a man and save the girl and beat the bad guy.
John and I also do a lot of talking about what De Palma wants from his audience.
He shocks people because of his anti-therapeutic ethic. He doesn’t want to comfort or distract people, but show them the evil our society wants to hide. He wants an intelligent audience that plays detective, that gets outraged when they’re exploited, and that’s moral enough to know its own weaknesses and openness to titillation.
He also has a remarkably childish sense of humor that is supposed to bring evil, as well as heroes, down from their pedestal. Strange to say, but De Palma has a populist attitude here. Porn stars and movie stars are interchangeable for him. But that also means that the vulgar guy nobody gives a damn about is way more important if you consider him as a human being, faced with the desire to be a somebody, to achieve some success, and do something with his life.
So vulgarity is supposed to be a counter-poison to success worship and to celebrity worship. We just have to be willing to take anonymous people seriously and we’ll see the American drama of dignity and success play out in their lives, too.
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I think you left out a crucial bit in the final scene about Jake finally finding the will to act. As he’s lying there with Gregg Henry looking down, saying, “Action!”, he goes back to the movie set with Dennis Franz. But this time, knowing the Dennis Franz is going to screw him over, he demands another take and (presumably) gets it right. It’s in that fugue state that he realizes that either he stops being a loser, or he dies.
And I think that’s the real change for his character in the end. He’s the same guy, in the same place, but he’s no longer a loser. It hasn’t made much difference yet, but you expect it will.
But how about the entire mall sequence, where over and over you have shots set up to show all three, quarry, hunter and shepherd, nearly coming in contact, as the scary Indian eludes her sight in a way that foreshadows the murder scene, where he remains invisible by stepping behind doors and around corners.
Of course, the most unrealistic aspect of the whole thing is the porn shoot. No porn movie ever made had a cast that size. There were thirty or forty people on set.
One more. This is the acting coach:
The other guy was Jake’s friend, an actor, who introduced him to Gregg Henry.
Yes, you’re exactly right! That’s what makes KKBB work, too. There’s a lot of misery in real America, especially if you think you’re ambitious–you’ll learn quickly that power is not moral. But if you look away from the glamour & look for something real, you might end up well–just not an immortal hero.
Action comedies do a damned public service this way…
That’s intended to show you–porn is Hollywood, Hollywood is porn… Unrealistic, but realistic.
Yup. Remember our grand Carlito’s way podcast–that was 80+ minutes. This is just 55 or so. In the future, when we’ll have tech-enchanced curatorial communities, we’ll just say, ok, let’s watch this movie some time this week & Saturday afternoon do some kind of video chat where we talk it over.
There really is so much there–in that scene you see a lot about the character of desire. The entire facade is respectability–that’s the irony of the mall. Consumerism is about status. But what is it really about? Some people want thrills, some people want to kill you. Protection & destruction are always there when you look at things; a sense of endangerment & vulnerability is necessary to make sense of what Americans actually experience as their freedom. Like the moment Jake sees the Indian seeing him as they’re both watching the woman. There you are & that’s what it’s like.
De Palma makes fun of pretentious movies–I thought we were shooting porn, not Last Tango!–because he can get the moral confusion of American freedom right in mundane genre pictures & thus show people to themselves in a way they can recognize & work with.
All this stuff is somehow necessary poetically to justify the guy’s turning into a success at the end. As you say, he’s gotta wise up & demand another take & nail it. It’s America–you’re always the actor, never the director. But you have choices about your acting. Freedom is real; the question is, can you make use of it in a good way for yourself & others!
This is why I say, De Palma is an all-American populist…
Forgot one point… the way the sequence is shot, it’s part horror but also like sinister French farce. One near miss after another, each person appearing just as the last one disappears.
That’s true.
It’s also Hitchcockian–he always called his movies comedies, for that reason.
You see the same thing, albeit not as elaborate, in Strangers on a Train.
Yup. That’s another one in the works–editing the podcast today…
Also, the scenes in the apartment across the backyard in Rear window.