The Problematics: ‘Body Double’ at 40, Drilling Down On Brian De Palma’s Most Brutal (And Misogynist?) Murderfest

Director Brian De Palma’s relationship with the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system was rocky from pretty much the very start of his career. His second feature film, 1968’s Greetings, was the first American-made picture to get slapped with an “X” (no one under 17 admitted) by that august body. (The first movie was the non-American The Girl on a Motorcycle, with Alain Delon and Marianne Faithfull.) Back in the ‘60s, for a very brief period, an “X” certificate was a rebellious badge of honor, a token of grooviness. One X-rated picture, Midnight Cowboy, even managed to win several Oscars. But this shining moment was brief indeed and soon after, “X” was a sign of disrepute and a sure cause of box office death.

“As soon as I get this dignity from Scarface I’m going to go out and make an X-rated suspense porn picture,” De Palma fumed in late 1983 to journalist Lynn Hirschberg. “I’m sick of being censored. Dressed to Kill was going to get an X rating and I had to cut a lot. So If they want an X, they’ll get a real X.”

Scarface didn’t exactly confer a lot of dignity on De Palma. And it also involved yet another enormous hassle over its rating, which I detail in my recent book The World Is Yours: The Story of “Scarface.” But it was a moderate box office hit. (Fun fact: De Palma managed to make a long film about a murderous and thoroughly uningratiating main character into box office gold, a trick Todd Phillips now dearly wishes he could re-learn.) Enough that he was able to go ahead with the movie he already had a title for when he gave Hirschberg his pitch: Body Double. Eventually the catch was that he would not make a “real X” movie, and he would use the studio system to make it. There were reasons. 

As anyone will tell you — well, not anyone, I guess; actually, probably rather few people can tell you, at least authoritatively, and I’m actually one of them — it’s one thing to say you’re going to make a hardcore pornographic film, and another thing to actually do it. The baseless rumor of the emotional sex scene in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now being genuine notwithstanding, to stage and shoot two human beings engaging in coitus involves skill sets not known to mainstream filmmakers, or performers for that matter. And even when it was flirting with the something like mainstream acceptance — remember “porno chic?” nah you’re probably too young — the distinction between even a softcore and a hardcore porn set was practically existential. Visually, aurally, olfactorily, it’s a different world. De Palma spent some time with prominent porn actress Annette Haven — one of the handful in the biz who had conventional movie-star good looks — who was his docent to the world of porn. He ultimately determined that she couldn’t cut it in the lead role he had initially envisioned for her, but she does cameo in the picture, along with a handful of luminaries of both hardcore and softcore. We can presume the experience also compelled him to rethink shooting unsimulated sex.

But the sexual content with which De Palma packed Body Double is potent. He chose Melanie Griffith, then in her mid-twenties, to play porn star Holly Body. He’d met the daughter of Hitchcock star Tippi Hedren while making Scarface; she was the girlfriend of actor Steven Bauer, who plays Tony Montana’s lieutenant Manny in the movie. And Double contains a funny Scarface in-joke. Bauer appears here as one of Holly’s sexual partners in a scene from Holly Does Hollywood, one of Double’s porno-films-within-a-film. He comes into a small room where Holly sits, prepared to do her oral stuff, and is interrupted by a voice on his walkie-talkie saying “Manny, where the hell are you? We need you on set.”

Body Double’s plot is a gloss on Hitchcock’s Rear Window, with some morbid femme obsession from Vertigo tempered in. During the height of his career De Palma got a lot of critical smack for his lifts from Hitchcock, but that was unfair. He didn’t take cues from Hitchcock because he was bereft of his own ideas; he did because he knew that the stuff could be constructively and pertinently updated in explicit contemporary terms. In crude terms, it meant he got show things that Hitchcock never could. But it also meant he could make the subtexts in Hitchcock bubble up to a mordant surface. 

Heights are the hero’s fear in Vertigo; in Body Double Jake Scully is claustrophobic, which makes his time in a coffin as a glitter-rock vampire (shades of De Palma’s early ‘70s quasi-glam musical Phantom of the Paradise!) in the movie’s opening less than tolerable. He freaks out, gets fired from the schlock movie he’s acting in, and now he’s got an impediment that he has to conquer in his hero’s journey. This journey finds him accepting the generosity of a fellow actor, who sets him up in a crazy ultra-modern UFO-like house in the Hollywood hills; across the way is another house with large horizontal windows and loosely space vertical blinds, and in that house a very scantily clad young woman dances with a remarkable lack of inhibition. Nice for Scully that the joint where he’s housesitting has a top-brand telescope. It’s almost too convenient, right?

And here, for all the rampant sex, corrosive inside-moviemaking humor, and general impertinent attitude, is where we hit the Problematic, in what, it happens, is the movie’s only murder. Given its grisliness, one is all Body Double needs.

In Scarface, one of the less fortunate minor characters met dismemberment and death by chainsaw, in the scene that almost got the movie slapped with an “X.” But that character was male. Here, a burly man with a wrinkled face, long braided hair, a mesh t-shirt, and a cowboy hat — referred to throughout as “The Indian” — kills an attractive woman with a power drill. Not the kind you use to screw nails into a wall. But an industrial one, with a large bit. This upsets Scully no end, because (I mean among other things) he’s just gotten to know her a bit and has even made out with her and stuff. So naturally, as she’s menaced with the drill he does leave the house from which he’s peeping and try to get help. 

The sequence is done with De Palma’s typical visual virtuosity, and also with, we have to say, an extremely perverse sense of humor. The killer is not entirely prepared for the way Deborah Shelton’s Gloria Ravelle will resist him, and he didn’t tote along an extension cord or power strip, so more than once as he’s trying to kill her, the plug of the drill gets tugged out of the wall outlet. These pauses give Jake more time to get to the house, but once he’s in, he has to contend with the terrifying guard dog, and it’s here we see the drill bit coming through the ceiling, spilling pints of blood on the animal and on Jake’s shirt. As with the Scarface chainsaw scene, you never see metal cut into skin (De Palma wasn’t so discreet in Dressed to Kill) but the effect is chilling to be sure. 

But is the scene misogynist? It’s worth recalling that the two most, if you’ll excuse the word, incisive books on De Palma, Susan Dworkin’s 1984 Double De Palma, largely about the making of this very film, and Julie Salamon’s 1991 The Devil’s Candy, about the making of his substantively less successful The Bonfire of the Vanities (which also co-starred Griffith), were written by women to whom he gave full cooperation. Dworkin certainly is on to something when contemplating the drill-murder scene, she notes that De Palma’s visual techniques therein “bring us and jake Scully to a not so subliminal conclusion. That the way the woman is beautiful, the murder is beautiful. That the way the woman is unreal, the murder is unreal.” One can go further and argue that what the murders of females in his films are really about are not actual women but representations of women. They are narrative manifestations of misogyny (and psychosis related to misogyny), not expressions of it. 

De Palma is such a thorough stylist that he sometimes reminds me of the novelist John Hawkes, who once infamously pronounced, “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme.” 

Alfred Hitchcock complained to François Truffaut about the category of filmgoers he dubbed “The Plausibles,” poking their fingers into plot holes both real and imaginary to undermine the fabric of narrative. De Palma’s plot machinations in this movie are so outrageously far-fetched that it’s clear that plausibility is nothing more than the baby accompanying the bathwater he’s throwing out. Ask not whether something makes sense, just let the bravura filmmaking work on you. And work it certainly does, even at its most “problematic.” Like much of his 1980s work, Body Double too is being acknowledged as a prescient classic in a genre — the erotic thriller — that many seem to sorely miss today. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.