Pornhound Goes to the Movies
Body Double (1984)
d. Brian DePalma; pr. Brian DePalma; scr. Brian DePalma, Robert J. Avrech; ph. Stephen H. Burum; m. Pino Donaggio; ed. Jerry Greenberg, Bill Pankow; cast. Craig Wasson, Gregg Henry, Melanie Griffith, Deborah Shelton, Dennis Franz, Barbara Crampton (114 mins)
Have you ever been so turned on by a sexily dressed woman in a shopping mall, say a long-haired brunette with red-brim insect eye sunglasses in a white dress that just hugs her sleek figure, that you’ve followed from behind just to get a longer look?
As you followed her, did you get a hard-on, dream of sweeping her into your arms and fuck her senseless? I have. Did you ever stare through a shop front window into a changing room stall to peek at a woman undress? I haven’t, though I’ve wanted to. If you can identify with these experiences and their perverse undertones of scopophilia and voyeurism, then director Brian DePalma’s Body Double may interest you.
Brian DePalma was one of the so-called “movie brat” generation, also rather condescendingly known as the "kids with beards" on account of a collective tendency to avoid shaving.
In experimental features he worked with Robert DeNiro before the actor teamed with Martin Scorsese for Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, films with a street level grit and kinetic sense of moral despair thanks to screenwriters Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader. But DePalma liked stylized horror and Italian giallo films. Driven by an obsession with the most perverse aspects of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, DePalma indulged in the stylized pop-culture fantasy of Phantom of the Paradise and then latched onto Stephen King for the gorehound classic Carrie. That film was responsible for the cycle of Stephen King adaptations that ran through the next thirty years but the film is less King than DePalma. Drug-obsessed Oliver Stone delivered him Scarface and he perfected his talent. Suddenly having made one of the most distinctive films of the 1980s, DePalma had increased creative control. However, the official reaction to Scarface was such that DePalma was on the hit list of the censors at the Motion Picture Association of America, who had initially sought to rate Scarface an X. Defiant, DePalma announced his plan to make a thriller involving the illicit but booming LA porn industry and cast a porn star in a leading role.
Rumours abounded that the film, Body Double, was to be the first Hollywood thriller to feature some hard core fucking!
And on the balcony is a telescope and in the window of the building opposite is a naked woman dancing and masturbating. She does the same routine every night. And every night he watches, soon noticing that someone else is watching too. He follows the girl to a mall, where he is reported to security as a peeping tom. From a bin he picks up and pockets a pair of underwear she threw away. Hot and horny he watches her only to notice another man there, armed with a power drill between his legs and looking to drill her to death.
The demands of a DVD reviewer not to reveal too much prevent me from describing anything further about the plot except in the abstract. But the hero of this film is a sexual deviant and pervert who gets off on peeping. Watching porn on a rotating bed he is enraptured by a bare-assed platinum blonde. He needs to know who she is, and DePalma is proud to present her for us. She’s Holly Body, star of Holly Does Hollywood, a porn actress with a sexy voice and a pouty come-on of a tight body. This is the role DePalma intended for a genuine porn actress, hoping to show her plying her trade. But the studio vetoed that and DePalma had to cast a regular actress, though one who was not afraid to play nude: Melanie Griffith. Long before she would capture a generation of aspiring yuppie American women in the hit comedy of Working Girl, or play Lolita’s mother in the Adrian Lyne remake of Lolita, Griffith was DePalma’s interpretation of a porn star. And to present a porn film in the making, DePalma chose to stage a sexy music video to the music of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and “Relax”.
That’s the pornhound appeal of Body Double. A guy gets a job doing porno to meet a star. He’s a bad actor but he can pass this audition – his dick is big enough!
The music is sexy, the girl is hot and Griffith plays the role with conviction, so much so that I identified fully when the guy came without even worrying about supplying a cum shot. This was the first time in a Hollywood genre movie that words like “cum shot” were used and the behind the scenes operations of the porn world glimpsed. Paul Schrader had done it in Hardcore but Schrader was harsh and condemning to the point of spite and vitriol whereas DePalma revelled in it and invited the viewer to do the same. But Craig Wasson is a poor actor, despite intriguing early work in the first ever Vietnam War movie The Boys in Company C and DePalma is too keen on deconstructing Hitchcock that the film becomes confusing and distanced, finally squandering its opportunities in mediocre self-referentiality.
In the end, Body Double is a failure. Too restrained in its perversity, it flirts with sexual deviance with unsure reserve: at once attracted to the eroticism yet so self-conscious of its own style as to draw attention to the manufactured nature of the same eroticism: DePalma tries to stand outside the genre and simultaneously provide its thrills. Although DePalma botches this mix, and the film is rarely involving except when questioning the nature of sexual obsession or ogling Griffith, by the end of the decade Robert Altman would do it to perfection in The Player. The devout pornhound may find something here, but the dope fiend will get only the high of the porno-movie making scene, a naked Melanie Griffith and an alternative “Relax” music video. With a bare bones DVD release, this is sadly little more than a diversion. For the gorehound, the film is essential for one scene: murder by power drill, filmed from an angle so that the drill seems like a monster penis twirling its way to penetrate and kill.
DePalma frequently had to defend himself against charges of misogyny, but for the critics and the feminists, the drill scene was indefensible and thereafter the director had to wear the label permanently in work written about him.
Indeed the scene’s mixture of gleeful sexual power and raw violence is less Hitchcock than a moment of pure giallo grindhouse triumph seen through a talented but uneven genre stylist. That and a little tits and ass porno movie-making up close are the main merits of Body Double.
"Your time, you're high: your choice!"
