ON THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Body Double (1984), the third Hitchcockian shock-thriller Brian De Palma wrote and directed after Sisters. An actor suffering from claustrophobia loses a part playing a vampire in a B-horror flick because he has a panic attack while filming a scene in a coffin. He winds up couch-surfing at a friend’s place. Luckily, a mutual acquaintance hooks him up with a house-sitting job at a bizarre flying saucer-shaped mansion on a hill (the exteriors for which were filmed at the real Chemosphere house in Los Angeles). The acquaintance also makes him look through a telescope pointed out the mansion’s rear. The actor sees that at this very moment down the hill, a beautiful woman happens to be dancing naked in front of her window. The acquaintance informs him that she does this every night. The actor quickly becomes fixated on her and finds himself drawn back to the telescope the following evening. This time, however, he sees that a gruesome-looking man with metal teeth is leering up at the woman from her driveway. The actor thus begins more intently watching and following the woman in order to warn her that the other man is watching and following her. Two nights later, the actor witnesses the other man break into the woman’s house and fatally perforate her abdomen with a huge power drill.
Well, sort of.
As you may have guessed from the title, all is not as it seems with this murder scene. The woman whom the actor saw performing a private burlesque show was actually a porn star (played gamely by Melanie Griffith) hired to be a rich woman’s body double. The rich woman is the one who is murdered. Meanwhile, the monstrous thug with the power drill is actually the woman’s husband wearing makeup. This man also turns out to be the acquaintance who hired the actor to house-sit.
Like Sisters, Body Double serves as an opportunity for De Palma to riff on his favorite Hitchcock references and tropes, with the inclusion of an eccentric’s precariously perched house, as in North by Northwest; a down-at-heels man watching his neighbor through a telescope and becoming entangled in a murder plot as a result, as in Rear Window; and the pursuit of a look-alike who stands in for a dead woman, as in Vertigo. Also as in Vertigo, the finale hinges on the protagonist overcoming a debilitating spatial dimension-based phobia. And as in Sisters, De Palma injects shots of nudity and gore that Hitchcock never would have been allowed—though this time there is a great deal more nudity than gore.
Above all, Body Double showcases De Palma’s obsession with cinema as voyeurism. His camera at once indulges in titillating sights and implicates the viewer in ogling them, thereby disarming the viewer’s moral objections. As we watch the protagonist become an unrestrained peeping tom, De Palma throws our moral scorn back on us by making us aware that we are just as mesmerized. Meanwhile, the film over and over underlines the irony of a protagonist fearing for a woman’s safety because he sees a less attractive man behaving in the same way that he is toward her. Nevertheless, the protagonist is right, there really is a mortal danger, and likewise, De Palma does not let us off the hook for the consequences of our own fascination, even if it is an obligatory part of our nature.
As for our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme, the most interesting development from the otherwise similar Sisters is the introduction of the actor as a major subspecies of doppelgänger. The woman that the hero is drawn to and seeks to protect is actually two women, one of whom is a professional mimic. On the other hand, the foe that the hero seeks to thwart and the friend who sets him up with a new job are actually one in the same person wearing two different faces. It’s no mistake that Body Double is framed by highly artificial scenes from the film within a film about a vampire. This framing reminds us that all cinematic works of fiction are filled with doppelgängers in that they contain actors playing characters. An actor and her character may have distinct personal identities, but these identities always share a face. Behind every face we see in a movie there lurks another conscious being.
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