Body Double

When this movie came out, all anyone could talk about was the nudity, sex and outrageous violence.  That, and the shameless borrowings from Vertigo and Rear Window.

Yeah, it’s got all those things.  But De Palma uses the sex and violence the same way the villain does, as a distraction.

Because while this movie is only serviceable as a murder mystery, it’s brilliant as an art film, a dense, witty, unpredictable, multi-layered fugue on the themes of illusion, perception and reality.

Scenes from movies seem real at first, no matter how obviously fake they are, and scenes of “real life” are shot using obviously fake devices like rear-screen projection.  Characters weave in and out of reality without warning, keeping us constantly on our guard regarding what’s “really happening,” even though we’ve seen by now that “what’s really happening” is quite low on the list of things De Palma is interested in.

In interviews, Scorsese is always talking about “Well, but is it real?”  Something tells me that’s not a phrase that comes up a lot on a De Palma set, although Scorsese and De Palma have a similar discomfort with the demands of genre.  Scorsese is happy to ignore the demands of genre in order to get at the core reality of his characters, and De Palma has grown so unhappy with genre that he seems to deliberately throw silly, hackneyed plot points into his movies almost as if to remind us that we’re not supposed to take any of this as literal truth.  There isn’t “really” a psychiatrist who’s dressing up in women’s clothing to murder people, there isn’t “really” a demented subject of evil psychiactric experiments running around and murdering mothers.  De Palma isn’t interested in suspension of disbelief, he’s interested in suspense for its own sake.  And while that might seem cold, slight or elitist to some, he’s actually doing his best to invite us in to his point of view by creating movies as fiendishly entertaining as this one.

The acting in this is quite good, by the way.  Craig Wasson and Guy Boyd, to pick two, are terrific in this and I’ve never seen them in anything else.  Very strange.

And another great credit crawl.

Sisters

In spite of borrowing heavily from Psycho, this turns out to be one of De Palma’s most original movies.

For some reason, it’s never occurred to me before now just how important issues of perception and point-of-view are to De Palma.  It’s not just the voyeuristic camera and the re-tellings of stories from different points of view (although his movies have plenty of both).  In both Raising Cain and Snake Eyes, there are scenes where there are scenes dreamt or recounted by characters, which turn out to be inaccurate, colored by perception or wholly false.  And the rational filmgoer says “But that’s a cheat, that’s not how it happened.”  Well, how do we “know what happened?”  We just saw it on film; but whose point of view was being presented on film?  That is, De Palma doesn’t seem interested in how it happened, he’s interested in what a character has perceived.

There’s a scene in Snake Eyes where Gary Sinise tells Nicolas Cage What Really Happened, and we see it played out on film.  And because of the use of subjective camera, we get the feeling that we’re seeing What Really Happened from Gary’s point of view.  Later, this explanation turns out to be a total fabrication.  Then how could we see his story on film?  Well, what we’re seeing is Nicolas Cage’s perception of what he thinks Gary’s story represents.  That may seem like hair-splitting, but it marks a cinematic conceptual leap that is rather extraordinary.

Similarly, in Raising Cain there’s the rather amazing sequence where Lolita Davidovich wakes up, goes to her bureau, finds that she’s given the wrong clock to her lover, goes to her lover’s hotel to switch the clocks, then wakes up to find that she’s actually in her lover’s bed already, then later wakes up to find that she’s actually still in her own bed.  But later we find out that only part of the dream-within-a-dream is a dream, part of it happened in real life.  So what De Palma showed us was a dream that at least in part recounted a real event.  When people chide De Palma for his use of hackneyed conventions, it’s useful to remember that he also often plays with our perceptions in deep and subtle ways.

Anyway, there’s this rather incredible scene in Act III of Sisters where Jennifer Salt is told the Big Secret That Explains the Whole Movie.  And instead of having the doctor sit calmly and explain it to us (like he does at the end of Psycho), he has the doctor drug Jennifer, tie her down to the bed, hypnotise her and put her through a traumatic fake operation.  Why?  Well I’d hate to spoil things, but let’s say that he wishes to leave her in a state of confusion. 

But as a wild tale of love, loss and medical mishap is told, she undergoes a series of bizarre hallucinations, some of which seem to be almost-literal representations of truth and others which make no sense whatsoever and approach Lynchian levels of weirdness and discomfort.

And it turns out that all of this information is quite useless to Jennifer as a protagonist.

Speaking of which, another neat trick is how the doctor is introduced as The Creepy Guy who’s stalking Margot Kidder, and by the end of the movie we realize that he’s really the Only Sane Man who could have stopped a lot of death and ruined lives, had not certain horrible things happened.