Just stumbled across this thread. Vid, I am sorry to say, but it appears you completely missed the underlying subtext of this film; don't feel bad; so did almost everyone else. I strongly urge you to read Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema and then to reconsider your perspective. To whet your appetite for such a task/suggestion, I include the opening paragraph I wrote for my explication of the film for a media studies course I took at the University of Buffalo ten or eleven years ago. "It seems unavoidable to conclude that Brian De Palma would have made his 1984 film Body Double in response to the discourse that arose following the publication of Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema, an essay which was published in Screen magazine that year. Unfortunately, there’s also no question that a far greater audience who saw the movie never heard of Laura Mulvey and had never read her essay. Post-Structural cinema analysis is, after all, hardly the stuff of daily conversation. Without the analytical reference point of the essay, and looking at the film through vacant eyes, it might be easy to pass the film off as another cheesy, neo B-grade, low-budget Hollywood cult flick headed for the midnight theaters in college towns. But that would miss the point, even while it nails it square on the head. This is the paradox of Post-Structuralism, Hollywood style, where meaning is ultimately in the eye of the beholder and a movie like Body Double might be seen as a biting social critique, and simultaneously fill the theater seats with fetishists." I'd be happy to PM the remainder of the paper to anyone interested in its content.
He's making American versions of the Italian giallo murder mysteries. Those are inspired by Hitchcock, particularly Psycho.
Body Double isn't a total dog by any means, but coming from De Palma I found it a big disappointment. More so because, in interviews leading up to it, the director promised the ultimate De Palma movie, filled with sex and violence far surpassing his previous work. He considered using Annette Haven in the Melanie Griffith role and there was even talk of the movie possibly getting an X rating. But I found the whole thing strangely uninspired, starting with the casting of Craig Wasson as the lead.
Wasson is just plain miscast. The movie has some wonderful visual tricks and the music video kind of works. Has a really wonderful Hitchcock nod with the drill sequence, but on the whole, it just doesn't hold your interest the way prime DePalma did.
Femmer Fatale was an interesting film, despite some...interesting casting choices, it had some great moments, probably his best later film, ive always loved Blow Out with John Travolta and Nancy Allen
Along with Hal Ashby, Brian De Palma is one of my favourite New Hollywood directors. Blow Out and Carrie are great.
Yeah, I'm sticking with "he made many movies that ripped off Hitchcock". Saying he remade movies "inspired by" Hitchcock doesn't make a convincing case that De Palma was a creative filmmaker - it makes him sound even worse, really...
So if we want to appreciate "Body Double", we have to read an essay first. That's the hallmark of good filmmaking! Sorry - my "vacant" eyes see "BD" as nothing more than a weak mishmash of "Vertigo" and "Rear Window"...
Beyond Hitchcock, I think Claude Chabrol had a huge influence upon De Palma. But, more particularly, De Palma is, as noted above, the premier American giallist. If one is familiar with Italian genre cinema of the late '60s/early '70s, his gleeful excursions into thematic and stylistic excess (in such films as Body Double, Dressed To Kill and Blowout) make complete sense. And as much as Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is historically important (and provides a solid introduction to Cahiers-inspired feminist psychoanalytic film theory), it's hopelessly flawed. Mulvey cites Vertigo as a prime example of the institutionalised male gaze, when that film is perhaps the apotheosis of Hitchcock's career-long deconstruction of (the visual logic) of male power! (And no doubt De Palma recognised this, given Obsession and his continuing fascination with deeply flawed male protagonists).
So did most of the audience. I saw it the night it opened in Hollywood, and it was a huge bomb. Sometimes, a bad film is a bad film, no matter what the pretentious subtext is. If a good basic story and solid characters aren't there, it's going to suck -- as it did in this case. It also bombed, which would indicate the vast audience agreed. I much prefer the Hitchcock films that inspired a lot of DePalma's images and plot details. (I also worked on a later DePalma film, Casualties of War, which I think is a much better film.) I do like some of the iconic shots of LA in the film, and the Chemosphere house is always pretty cool. I feel bad for actor Craig Wasson, who had the misfortune of being in a couple of big 1980s bombs, which pretty much killed his career as a leading man.
Scarface is a favorite of mine. I also like Carrie (the first movie to really scare me as a kid!) and The Untouchables. Mission Impossible is a pretty decent action movie too.
Scarface Dressed to Kill Blow Out The Fury Carrie But it's hard to narrow it down to five - Phantom of the Paradise, Body Double, Femme Fatale and Casualties of War are all excellent.
How exactly is the subtext "pretentious"? You clearly haven't read Mulvey's essay and I know you haven't read my explication. I think the very first thing you should ask yourself is "Why did this woman Laura Mulvey write an essay and submit it to Screen magazine?" Then ask, "Why did Screen magazine publish it?" Then one might consider why it was that the essay created such a stir after it was published. I do agree with the (unsaid) implication that the film comes up short if the director's intent (and subsequent audience expectation) is to create some sort of serious dramatic filmmaking (I.e., Jagged Edge, Body Heat, or the Last Seduction) but that was clearly not the case and anyone watching that film who fails to recognize blatant "camp" film making when it is thrust in their face perhaps ought not be playing the critic. When you see a film like that the first questions one should ask themselves is WHAT? and WHY? because it is so obviously constructed in such a way as to invite contempt as a knee-jerk reaction. You might as well expect The Rocky Horror Picture Show to be a great film on that superficial level. The difference is that De Palma's film was constructed with specific intent and messages, or suggestions, and succeeds in both, or all. If one would have asked themselves the WHAT? and the WHY? questions it would have been an opening to the basis for a substantially greater understanding--one that is infinitely more rewarding than simple dismissal and contempt. (Admittedly this may be expecting too much out of a typical Hollywood audience!) There is an often forgotten axiom about art that there is a responsibility required of both the artist and the audience in terms of a finding a work's ultimate value (which might be achieved in any number of ways). Robert Fripp wrote with great erudition about this at one point in the early 80s. The artist creates the work but if the audience is insufficiently sensitive, or enlightened, or cultured, (etc etc etc) to understand or appreciate that work, then the artist has not failed other than the fact the artist did not create a work simplistic and obvious enough so that more people understood and appreciated the work. (Extrapolating, you will recognize this as the oft-referenced "lowest common denominator".) If it is not perfectly clear, there is a continuum of audience acceptance (from one perspective) or quality (from another). If you want to base the idea of "quality" or success on box office tickets or albums sold then you are using a lowest common denominator. (By this standard The Bible is the greatest work of writing ever. By this standard Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code is one of the greatest pieces of literature ever!). Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, and Beethoven all come off as lesser artists in that scenario. We might go to other places in the art world to expand the discussion. We could look at Van Gogh's work through the eyes of a viewer of his time and dismiss his work as simplistic daubing with paint. We could similarly rebel at the early Impressionist's work because, well, it "only" creates an impression of a scene. It doesn't really attempt to capture the visual image in front of the painter as he (or she) sits at the easel. Both of those were common popular reactions to Van Gogh and Monet but there was no context in the public imagination and public knowledge at the time. You can say that the quality of those artist's work improved over time, miraculously apparently, because clearly the painting did not! No, what changes is the perception of the viewer as the viewer becomes more knowledgable and more sophisticated and a context, individual, collective, and historical is developed. Let's go to the world of music--another very famous instance of an audience reacting negatively: the first performance, in 1913 Paris, of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring--the ballet and classical music score. Supposedly a near riot broke out and audience and critics alike were apoplectic. That music is now viewed as one of music's great masterpieces and a Modernist breakthrough. What changed? Was the music bad and now it's good? Why was that audience so clearly contemptuous of the music? A year after I had taken that course in the media media studies department (in which I learned a great deal about how one ought to, or could, deal with art in order to get the greatest possible experience out of it) I attended an alternative theater performance (in the back of a seedy Ukrainian Community Center on the east side of Buffalo!). The performance that night was a local production of Harold Pinter's Family Voices. The play was difficult and I struggled throughout to get on some sort of "same page" as Pinter, or somehow, to get inside of his head, his thinking. It was not a terribly enjoyable play (not helped by the incredibly shady surroundings) and I most definitely did not "get it" but I kept asking WHAT? And WHY? The next day the whole thing was gnawing at me so I went online and found a copy of the play which was delivered a few days later. I read the play through (it's short), set it aside, and read it again the next day. It was a week or so past the time I'd seen the performance when out-of-the-blue I experienced an absolute explosion of insight in my head and the entire play opened up--there was absolute clarity (and hence greater appreciation of the play as art). What changed? Was the play bad because I did not initially "get it" and it suddenly became very good because I did "get it"? How can it be both bad AND very good? No, what changed was that I FINALLY got to that "middle ground" where artist and audience have a mutual responsibility to get to. The play was transformed in that instant into something else entirely. So people can dismiss De Palma's Body Double and they can choose ignorance too. That, or either, is a choice. Or they can ask themselves the WHAT and WHY questions and just possibly learn something in the process. Of course if you just want to let your brain shut down and escape into vacuous computer-driven special effects and/or other gratuitous cinematic BS, then don't bother.
All that might be true. Or "Body Double" might just be a crappy film. I stand by my assertion: if you have to read a decade-plus old essay to "get" a movie, then the filmmaker has failed. Especially when the film is produced as mass entertainment. If you make something for a niche, go for it, but to insult the audience who doesn't "get" a movie because of its obscure subtext seems like a weak defense. But with my vacant eyes and shut-down brain, what do I know?
Nope. Not sure how having seen the movies that allegedly inspired De Palma will make something like "Body Double" good in any case...
Perhaps you can explain why and how one person's art is another person's "crap"? The film doesn't change, only one person's ability to perceive differently than another and that is all about levels of knowledge, sophistication and context. If all of those are elevated to some sufficient degree and you still decide you don't like it, you can still feel like the film is "crap" but that does not make the film so; it only makes your perception of the film such. But clearly you don't "get" either the film or the point I was trying to make so perhaps we ought to just leave it at that.
Or perhaps there's nothing to "get" and attempts are being made to elevate a bad film to greatness via pseudo-intellectual references...
