Vintage Cable Box: Body Double (1984)
Body Double, 1984 (Craig Wasson) Columbia Pictures
“You’re my only witness to this murder, and you’re a peeper. In my book, that’s a pervert and a sex offender.”
“I do not do animal acts. I do not do S&M or any variations of that particular bent, no water sports either. I will not shave my pussy, no fistfucking and absolutely no coming in my face.”
Brian De Palma has an unusual metric in his filmed output. He will have “personal” projects eating away at him until he can get the money together to make them (and are usually written by him), and then the studio projects he will be offered in the lean years. Body Double, a personal project, followed Scarface, a big-budget studio project which, in turn, followed Blow Out, another personal project.
Though there were financial hits and flops, it was an astounding body of work for the time. Savaged by critics at release, these movies are all considered classics today and they were made in the space of four years. Body Double takes its title from the practice of using nude stand-ins for actors in movies, the most famous at the time being Angie Dickinson in De Palma’s Dressed to Kill.
De Palma was ridiculed for using 1977 Penthouse Pet of the Year model Victoria Lynn Johnson in place of Dickinson. Body Double is about a different kind of “body double,” even though we get a hilarious end-credits sequence with an actual body double for the low-budget horror movie, Vampire’s Kiss (not to be confused with the 1988 Nicholas Cage opus).
Struggling actor Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) comes home to find his girlfriend (Barbara Crampton) with another man. He goes out to get drunk and runs into a colleague, Sam (Gregg Henry) from his acting class who offers him a house-sitting job at a fantastic futuristic octagonal structure (known as the Chemosphere). He has but one condition: water the plants.
He also clues Jake into an exhibitionist neighbor (Deborah Shelton) who likes to do a little striptease dance for the benefit of no one in particular, but Sam does keep a handy telescope in the house. In Hitchcockian fashion, Jake becomes obsessed with his neighbor. He watches her through the telescope even when she isn’t dancing. One night he spies an altercation between her and a monstrous-looking man. He takes to following her everywhere she goes.
He even works up the courage to approach her, but she is assaulted and robbed in a tunnel by the mystery man. He tries to intervene, but his suffocating claustrophobia causes him to panic. Later, the man enters her home and murders her with an enormous power drill. As it turns out, the man had mugged her for her card key to gain admittance.
Trapped in a downward spiral of depression and alcohol, Jake watches porn to pass the time. He comes across an actress named Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) who dances in the exact same fashion as his now-dead neighbor. He does a little research and goes in for an audition so he can shoot a scene with her.
In short order, Jake discovers anybody can buy her services, and that she was indeed commissioned for a “peeping tom” scenario. Jake figures out she was the body double for his neighbor hired to get him interested enough to spy on her and be a witness to her murder.
This is brilliant stuff, obviously owing a great deal to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but I still enjoy it. It’s constructive on the order of Blow Out in that we have a character who unravels an enormous puzzle based on a predisposition toward spying on people in some way. In Blow Out, he’s a man who hears something that doesn’t sound right.
In Body Double, he sees something that isn’t quite right, and both movies take their time to tell a story. A whole section of Body Double is devoted to the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the adult movie industry. In a memorable departure, Frankie Goes to Hollywood performs their signature song, “Relax,” with Craig Wasson. Body Double is incredible.
