* * * Part II
Back
in the mid-nineties, the films of Alfred Hitchcock had their own
section in video stores, including Blockbuster Video, and Hitchcock
even had his own featured display at Universal Studios, along with
the famous “Psycho house” set – but the early films of Brian
DePalma and pretty much any film by Dario Argento were pretty
difficult to come by. I was able to find and rent DePalma's The Fury
on VHS from an independent video store close to where I lived in
North Vancouver; and after searching around different video stores in
Vancouver, Surrey, North Vancouver, and West Vancouver, I finally
came upon (in that last city) a videotape copy of Argento's Suspiria
and DePalma's Sisters. Rented the former and asked the video clerk if
he would be willing to sell me the latter – and he agreed, letting
me know that Brian DePalma's 1973 film was not exactly a hot renter.
Well, he didn't exactly use those words, but I was thrilled that he
was willing to sell me the Warner Brothers VHS tape for ten dollars.
Bringing that tape home, it would be the first time I'd see what is
DePalma's first foray into the ultra-stylish, erotic, and bloody gory
realm of his mystery horror-thrillers – exactly the type of dark,
sexy, and violent mystery-thrillers that he would be celebrated for
(and become the center of controversy by) in the first half of the
1980s. Sisters would also draw the definitive line where DePalma
began experimenting with dual- and alternate-personalities, a subject
that would mark (and somewhat define) his later works through Dressed
to Kill and Raising Cain. The idea of “doubles” that also comes
about in Sisters when we're introduced to Margot Kidder's twin
sister, had been toyed with by DePalma previously in his thriller
Obsession and of course was taken from Vertigo, the “double” in
Hitchcock's film the object of much anguish and obsession to leading
man Stewart.
* * *
The
“double” in Hitchcock's Vertigo appears after the wife of
Stewart's lost friend suddenly commits suicide after leading Stewart,
suffering the affliction of the film's title, up the freakishly steep
steps of an old cathedral to the top of the interior of a bell tower.
Stewart witnesses this suicide, not by sight, but by hearing first
Novak's scream and then discovering that she's jumped from the bell
tower to her death. DePalma one-ups this witness-to-the-death
scenario in his own Body Double (1984) by having his protagonist,
played by Craig Wasson, actually see the heroine getting brutally
murdered with a constructionist's power drill. In both Vertigo and
Body Double this death of the heroine appears at the halfway points
through each film. For all intents and purposes, DePalma's Body
Double is a remake of Hitchcock's Vertigo.
DePalma
cleverly employs the idea of Hollywood's body double – a model who
steps into place for a film actress when nude close-ups are required
– into the actuality of his thriller-plot for Body Double, a film
that DePalm never even had intended to direct in the first place, but
yet would mark the cumulative film of his masterwork trilogy (Dressed
to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double) from 1980 – 1984.
Columbia
Pictures, the Hollywood studio responsible for producing Body Double,
actually flatly refused to produce the film for DePalma unless he
himself directed it. Even the studio know that Body Double would not
succeed with the auteur taking a backseat as writer/producer; he
needed to helm the project himself. When DePalma finally agreed to
direct (dropping an unproduced pet project to do so), Ccolumbia
Pictures greenlit the project and filming commenced in Los Angeles in
1984 – amongst much controversy. By 1984, DePalma had already
acquired a reputation to rival any of his own fictional
split-personality characters – he was revered as an auteur, a
maverick, and decried for being nothing more than a Hitchcock rip-off
artist, and at worst, a misogynist. Displaying the violent and bloody
deaths of attractive women in his films were commonplace. Or the
femme fatale might be a deranged maniac herself. But there was always
an undeniable beauty in his shots; it always seemed to me that
DePalma loved women, and he wanted to celebrate them in the very same
manner he strove to celebrate his greatest influence – Hitchcock.
“Culture
uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women” – Elisabeth
Bronfen
Everything
about Body Double is done in extreme excess, including the nearly
endlessly flowing and spinning camerashots used to comprise the often
over-complicated sequences (like when Wasson follows the object of
his curiosity and desire, Deborah Shelton, through the Escher-like
maze of the multi-leveled Beverly Hills mall, utilizing elevators,
escalators, and store windows to construct the framework for both the
scene and the scene's satirical criticism of the changing times –
in Vertigo, James Stewart may have been able to follow Kim Novak
around the city without much question from outsiders – in DePalma's
version, Wasson is made to feel like, and look like, a leering
pervert). Adding to the excess of Body Double is the intricately-shot
series of voyeuristic set-pieces, the abundant nudity, the ease with
which DePalm shifts his backdrop from the B-movie Hollywood movie
industry to the hardcore Los Angeles pornography industry while we,
the audience, never blink an eye. And finally, of course, the violent
and bloody deaths that occur to propel the mystery plot along. The
death of what may have been the leading heroine, Deborah Shelton, as
also infused with electrifying suspense and action as Wasson, having
witnessing the murder actually occurring, is literally running for
her life as he tries to save her – although he must (impossibly)
cover the distance between the scene of her murder, in her own house,
and the hilltop house he was spying on her from through a long-lensed
telescope.
Dispatching
with the leading heroine halfway through a film was a plot device
that intrigued Alfred Hitchcock – although he employed this device
in his masterpiece Vertigo, he would revisit it sooner than later in
Psycho, a film based on a book by celebrated horror author Robert
Bloch. Of the book, Hitchcock had been known for saying: (The death
of the leading lady) was the only interesting thing about the book.
You'll notice that this statement wasn't in quotation marks as I'm
paraphrasing though keeping within Hitchcock's spirited feelings
about the book and its plot. In fact, however, the character of
Marion Crane is killed before the end of the third chapter in Bloch's
book. It's just that up until then, she had been the main focus,
although Norman Bates was actually introduced on page one. But
Hitchcock really was a master of cinematic plotting, and his changes
to Bloch's novel served the film version of Psycho in unprecedented,
iconic ways at that point in film history.
One of
the key differences between Hitchcock's Vertigo and DePalma's Body
Double is that in Hitchcock's film, after the death of the heroine,
James Stewart finds her double purely through coincidence and
accident. In DePalma's version, Wasson, still obsessed with Shelton
and now spiraling downward with guilt and regret, decided to take
matters into his own hands and turn himself into a very convincing
amateur detective. In Vertigo we get the idea that James Stewart
feels something is not right after seeing Novak's double. The
uncertainty simmers under his outward actions in trying to romance
this double. In Body Double, Wasson more overtly conveys the fact
that he knows something is amiss, albeit after a twist on Vertigo's
key scene – where James Stewart runs into the double on the street,
in front of a storefront, by accident; Wasson's character sees
Shelton's body double – essentially the person he'd actually been
tricked into spying on – performing the same open-curtain
striptease routine on a trailer ad for a porno film on late-night
cable one night while drunk and brooding over the murder of Shelton.
Where James Stewart recognizes the face of the double, Wasson
recognized the body and sexualized dance of Shelton's double. The
body double in DePalma's film is played by Melanie Griffith, daughter
of Tippi Hedren, who made had her own cinematic mark by starring in
Hitchcock's films The Birds and Marnie.
Craig
Wasson begins his amateur detecting by first visiting the porn
section of a Hollywood videostore, of course. This is not atypical
behavior for DePalma's characters, which I'll get into in a minute.
DePalma is clearly all too happy to show us the interior of this
videostore location from 1984 – shelves stocked with all manner of
videotapes, both VHS and the doomed BETA cassettes, the lavish cover
boxes from the movie studios all arranged across meters and meters of
shelving units, leading (or guiding) Wasson to the back of the store
– in to the depths, where the “Adult” movies are categorized
and kept. In 1984, the porn industry was the key pillar to the
videotape-rental industry. Even in 1991, a high school friend of mine
who worked at the largest Canadian videostore chain, Roger's Video,
told me that without the “Adult” section in the rear room of the
store, the location she was working at could not survive financially.
Blockbuster wanted everyone to believe that the family-aspect of
videostore rentals was what was defining the industry. This was an
outright lie, it was the porn industry. Blockbuster tried to change
the industry by being the only video store/chain that did not house
an “Adult” section and had studios create specific non-NC17
version of films for them (both Last Tango in Paris and Showgirls had
been re-cut for Blockbuster specifically). But the truth was that
porn ruled. In North Vancouver, where I was living at that time,
there were two video-rental stores called Red Hot Video that dealt
only in “Adult” movies, and that business was thriving. These
stores were also the center of their own controversy when a women's
group claimed responsibility for bombing these stores in 1984 – the
same time DePalma was filming Body Double in California.
(To
be continued...)
--V.
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