By Landon Huneycutt
Jean-Pierre Melville was a French director obsessed with American culture. He wore a cowboy hat and aviators and drove a Mustang while listening to Frank Sinatra. At one point in his life he watched five films a day, often American ones, his favorite being John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle. He directed an array of great crime films* and some outside the crime genre that were also excellent. His works are a strange mix of French and American with a distinct precision, coldness and romantic streak that have gone on to influence filmmakers such as John Woo, Michael Mann and Johnnie To. Melville took his love for the familiar crime genre and created his own codes, conventions and language that display a clear conceptual and aesthetic sensibility.
Melville comes to mind when I consider the work of director Brian De Palma, whose films of the ’70s and early ’80s, such as Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out and Body Double, were said to be homages to director Alfred Hitchcock. But that assessment boxes De Palma in as purely pastiche, which is unfair. Like Melville, De Palma worked with an established film language to form his own. That’s different from creating empty exercises of imitation, which has been done many times to mimic the distinctive work of both directors.
The primary difference between the French master of crime and De Palma is the latter’s work was more in the vein of the experimental French director Jean-Luc Godard, often utilizing a Brechtian approach of keeping a clear distance between characters and the audience. Body Double, showing at The Independent Picture House as part of our Summer of ’84 series, examines Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Rear Window, along with Hollywood’s lack of morality, hedonism and horrid treatment of women. It does this through searing satire and a technical wizardry that implements many of De Palma’s film staples: shots using a split diopter lens, tracking, large operatic set pieces and the embrace of the artificiality of fiction and absurdism.
De Palma uses classic techniques such as rear projection, but the film is unwilling to fully give in to its beauty. Pino Donaggio’s score, even at its height of sweeping romanticism, contains an undercurrent of terror. Our protagonist, Jake Scully, is a timid and weak man but finds his calling to protect a woman he’s been voyeuristically admiring. Not just a critique of the industry itself, the film critiques both the violent offenders and “nice guy” protagonists.
De Palma often gets criticized for dramatics that are satirical and satire that is dramatic. Many argue over where the satire begins and ends, and like the director Paul Verhoeven, he leans into the very aspects he critiques. Hollywood and the audience want breasts and blood. He’ll give them that, but he will rip Hollywood at the seams in the process. The film recognizes a faux-progressivism where women’s liberation amounts to women taking their clothes off for the camera. Sex and eroticism are replaced with pornography and provocation. While Vertigo was more of a confessional by Hitchcock, Body Double is a confession and evisceration of the very industry De Palma was a part of.