Casey Chong revisits Brian De Palma’s Body Double as it celebrates its 40th anniversary…
Brian De Palma’s works may have been inconsistent but at his peak, he directed a fair share of memorable genre films that defined his career. As a self-professed fan of Alfred Hitchcock, he has exploited the Master of Suspense’s themes, tones and styles and made it uniquely his own. Some detractors may accuse him of ripping off Hitchcock, particularly during the early days of his career between the 1970s and 80s era from Sisters to Obsession and Dressed to Kill. But it’s hard to deny De Palma’s contributions to the cinema worthy of an analysis no matter if you are a film student or an ardent movie fan, which brings us to there’s Body Double, the 1984 neo-noir thriller which celebrates its 40th anniversary today…
Voyeurism takes center stage
One of the main themes in Body Double revolves around struggling actor Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), who is fortunate enough to house-sit a luxury hilltop home while his fellow actor-friend (Gregg Henry’s Sam Bouchard) is away for work, gets his nightly entertainment spying the sexy female neighbor using a telescope. He enjoys watching her perform an erotic dance in her bedroom.
Scully’s voyeurism immediately recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where James Stewart’s photojournalist character would spend his time watching his neighbors across his apartment. Both movies end with the protagonists witnessing a murder, prompting them to do their own investigations. In the case of Scully, he saw a mysterious man trying to strangle the neighbor with a telephone cord, resulting in him quickly making his way to her house as fast as he could.
For the first hour of Body Double, De Palma, who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Robert J. Avrech, took the deliberate path of setting up his own version of Rear Window. What begins as harmless fun for Scully to take a peek at the sexy neighbor slowly escalates into an unlikely murder. He also incorporates the double-take element in Scully’s voyeurism from what he saw with the telescope, making us (the viewers) question and play armchair detectives trying to piece the puzzle together surrounding the neighbor’s subsequent murder.
Who is the craggy-faced man that keeps stalking her day and night? Does the neighbor’s husband, whom Scully initially saw him abuse her have to do with the murder scheme? Or is the whole thing just an elaborate set-up that nothing is what it seems? Whatever the answer may be, De Palma successfully lures his viewers to delve deep into Scully’s journey as the mystery gradually unfolds.
Scully’s unhealthy obsession that goes too far
De Palma also slipped in the theme of obsession in Body Double, evidently with Scully getting more preoccupied with the neighbor’s routines. It isn’t just about watching her doing the nightly erotic dance but also starts tailing her from the mall to the seaside motel. The director paints Craig Wasson’s Scully as a sort-of-loser protagonist, who doesn’t seem to catch a big break no matter what he does.
From the beginning of the movie itself, Scully is completely stiff from the result of his acute claustrophobia being in a dark, confined space after failing the coffin-set scene while filming a low-budget horror “Vampire’s Kiss” (the director is played by Dennis Franz, who would go on appearing in one of TV’s most groundbreaking cop series in NYPD Blue in 1993). His girlfriend ends up cheating on him and his own acting career seems to be going down the drain. What’s left of him is the unlikely obsession with the neighbor as if her existence brings him a real sense of purpose.
Besides, the neighbor played by Deborah Shelton is the type that’s hard not to fall in love with her alluring beauty. The fact that Scully subsequently follows her around in the mall to the point he sneakily keeps the panties in his pants pocket, which the neighbor has newly bought from the store but somehow tosses it in a trash bin renders him a pervert. He may mean no harm because he cares about her even if his act of obsession and perversion tells a different story from the moral perspective.
De Palma isn’t afraid of making his protagonist non-traditional and unlikeable – a loser and a Peeping Tom obsessing with someone he barely knows the person at all. And yet, the strange thing about Craig Wasson’s character is how one might feel sorry for him and his predicament for landing himself into trouble makes it a guilty-pleasure piece of entertainment.
Using claustrophobia to heighten tension
Rear Window isn’t the only Hitchcock movie that De Palma gamely pays homage to in Body Double. He even took his cue from Vertigo, where Jimmy Stewart’s character suffered from the case of acrophobia. Scully’s claustrophobic nature in this movie is already addressed right from the beginning, even though it wasn’t depicted for suspense. That comes later, at one point, the foot chase between Scully and the man after the latter snatched the neighbor’s handbag ends up in a tunnel – a result that triggers his claustrophobia. De Palma employs disorienting camera angles to mimic the effect as Scully sticks himself against the wall while gasping for air as if he’s suffocating.
The same claustrophobia hits Scully again, this time in the depth of a grave during the climactic third act. The ending also sees De Palma unexpectedly take us back to the film set of “Vampire’s Kiss” with Scully lying in the coffin and failing to fulfil the shot due to his claustrophobia. It looks as if he is looking to toy with our expectations that everything that happened before is just Scully’s inner thought, only to lure us back to the grave scene. The result may have been showy but De Palma’s intention is clear: He uses such an unconventional method to show how Scully finally overcomes his fear once and for all.
A movie worthy of a second chance
It’s a pity that Body Double’s $10 million budget failed to recoup at the box office when it was originally released on October 26, 1984. It opened at No. 3 at $2.8 behind The Terminator and Terror in the Aisles, where the two movies debuted at No. 1 and 2 respectively. Body Double didn’t stay in the Top 10 box office as it plummeted quickly before ended its theatrical run for just $8.8 million.
Frankly, it’s easy to dismiss the sheer vulgarity of gratuitous sex, nudity and violence that De Palma uses explicitly to generate cheap and tawdry entertainment. But like some of his movies that were initially misunderstood, Body Double gradually gained a cult following as the years went by. And it deservedly so since Body Double features some of De Palma’s crafty narrative and visual approach of misdirection in his storytelling while his recurring themes of voyeurism and obsession (also seen in Blow Out and Femme Fatale) are put into good use.
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Casey Chong
