REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)
By:
April 9, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
BODY DOUBLE | BRIAN DE PALMA | 1984
If you went to see Body Double at a second-run house in 1984, it was probably billed as an “erotic thriller.” Inside the grindhouse world, though, we called such movies Girl-Meets-Knife. This is a perfect example of Girl-Meets-Knife. The girl, in this case, meets a phallic drill… but still.
Besides the eviscerating of women, Girl-Meets-Knife movies had certain things in common. They tended to be “meta” (as we now put it; “reflexive,” then), not so much in the defamiliarizing Brechtian way, but simple because these filmmakers truly and deeply, and ultimately sweetly, really loved movies. Brian De Palma, who famously makes movies that refer to the movies he loves — you’ll find not only Hitchcock but Godard and Antonioni in Body Double — takes the nature of Hollywood and movie-making for this theme.
Here, Craig Wasson plays Jake, a struggling actor who is set up to witness a murder. House-sitting in the Hollywood Hills, in a home of ludicrous opulence, he is influenced to spy on a neighbor who pleasures herself nightly via an erotic dance. We’re spying on the dance too, thanks to the direct-to-lens POV De Palma perfected in Blow Out. And we watch her murdered by a power drill that emerges from between the legs of a hideous villain.
Peeping at the neighbor through a telescope, Jake is right up close — but also at a remove, across a ravine, helpless to do anything but watch. We, too are set up to watch but unable to act. Moviegoers are always in some sense passive voyeurs, but we’re only really punished for it in a Girl-Meets-Knife.
Jake’s initial passivity, and his eventual transition into action, is also a feature of the the Girl-Meets-Knife. It is here, rather than with the splatter metrics of the adorable starlets, that such movies always lose me. If a girl has to meet a knife, why can’t it be in service of something grand and redemptive… as opposed to allowing some neurotic dude to find himself? That said, Body Double is a goofy gag-shop can of peanuts, packed with so many sproinging fakeout snakes that you cannot help but be a willing witness to its charms.
REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Annie Nocenti on AFTER HOURS | Lynn Peril on BRAZIL | Mandy Keifetz on BODY DOUBLE | Carlo Rotella on ROBOCOP | Marc Weidenbaum on GROUNDHOG DAY | Erik Davis on REPO MAN | Mimi Lipson on STRANGER THAN PARADISE | Josh Glenn on HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING | Susan Roe on HOUSEKEEPING | Gordon Dahlquist on SOMETHING WILD | Heather Quinlan on EATING RAOUL | Anthony Miller on MIRACLE MILE | Karinne Keithley Syers on BETTER OFF DEAD | Adam McGovern on WALKER | Ramona Lyons on MILLER’S CROSSING | Vanessa Berry on WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS? | Elina Shatkin on NIGHT OF THE COMET | Susannah Breslin on MAN BITES DOG | Tom Nealon on DELICATESSEN | Lisa Jane Persky on RUMBLE FISH | Dean Haspiel on WEIRD SCIENCE | Heather Kapplow on HEATHERS | Micah Nathan on BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA | Nicholas Rombes on SLACKER | Mark Kingwell on WITHNAIL AND I.
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