Notes inspired by some links between Brian De Palma’s Hi, Mom! (1970) and Body Double (1984)
by Glenn Kenny
[It is an honor to have one of my personal heroes, film writer Glenn Kenny of the wonderful Some Came Running, contribute a piece with a unique perspective on De Palma's sexual predilections.]
In Brian De Palma's giddy, absurdist, radical early feature
Hi, Mom, Robert De Niro plays a disturbingly disaffected young man named Jon Rubin. The character was introduced in DePalma's prior film, 1969's
Greetings. He's an ardent voyeur and would-be filmmaker, and he's got an inspiration. He intends to invent gonzo porn some two decades
avant le lettre by surreptitiously filming himself getting it on with woman from the building across from his own (a fantasy object he's discovered in his obsessive peeping, played by Jennifer Salt).
Of course, in order to make the scheme work, he's got to meet, attract, and seduce her first, which he does by putting on the mask of a sensitive square and inventing some malarkey about a computer date. Once he's gotten her out—they attend a double feature of David and Lisa and Porgy and Bess before going to dinner—he elicits her sympathy by relating this tale of woe: ...reminds me of something that happened to me. I was coming home... I was living with a girl, Barbara, a few years ago and, uh, it was her birthday and I came home and I had presents and, uh, cake and candles and all kinds of confetti and crepe paper, and I was rushing up the stairs, ecstatic. I opened the door very quietly, crept in, and I heard the shower running. Well I open the door to the bathroom...and I hear some voices...and all of a sudden I open the shower curtain and there...there she is with another person...they were naked...and the funny thing about it is he had this kind of laugh, this kind of evil grin...and it really threw me and I naturally ran out of the place in a state of shock, I didn't know what to do...
As tales of cuckolding and in flagrante discovery go, it's pretty banal, and wouldn't be worth noting had not De Palma put nearly exactly the same scenario on film almost 15 years later in his controversial Hitchcock/porn-schlock pastiche Body Double.
There's no birthday in this version. Craig Wasson (perpetually hapless and anticipating the New Male stylings of, um, Bill Maher, yeesh) plays struggling actor Jake Scully, whose vertigo, I mean claustrophobia, I mean claustrophobia as Brian De Palma and co-screenwriter Robert J. Avrech have decided to imagine it, compels him to blow a springing-from-the-coffin take in Vampire's Kiss, the B-horror picture he's starring in. Feigning sympathy, director Rubin (no, the name of this De Palma stand in, portrayed with near-unseemly relish by Dennis Franz, is not a coincidence) gives Jake the rest of the day off. Goofy smile on his face Jake zips away in his sharp blue vintage Mustang (note the late-Hitchcock homage in the not-very-accomplished rear projection) to Tail O' The Pup where he gets a few dogs. Once at his apartment we see he's preparing a meal for two. There's a neon sign reading "Jake [heart] Carol" on a table. Jake goes off to find Carol, and there are a number of tracking POV shots attesting to coupledom; we see the "family" dog, and two dressing mannequins with the couples' head shots tacked to the heads, and so on. Jake continues to smile as he hears some laughing voices, but loses the grin as he cracks open a door...
...to see his beloved Carol straddling Some Dude.
Oops! (Carol is, we note here, played by future Re-Animator scream queen Barbara Crampton, the ineffable love object of het perv cinephiles the world over.) DePalma here chooses to omit Some Dude's laugh and evil grin (although we did hear the laugh prior to discovery), but it's not really necessary. We get the idea like nobody's business.
And it is here that we turn to our good friend Robin Wood and his invaluable 1986 text Hollywood From Vietnam To Reagan. One of our favorite Woodsian devices is the bold-pronouncement-right-off-the-bat, as in "Scarface belongs with the comedies," and the opening of his Vietnam/Reagan chapter on DePalma does not disappoint in this respect: "Brian DePalma's interesting, problematic, frequently frustrating movies are quite obsessive about castration, either literal (Sisters, Dressed to Kill), or metaphorical (all the rest)." (An asterisk after this sentence leads us to this note: 'Since this chapter was written, Body Double [though it is far from being among DePalma's best films] has amply confirmed its [sic] argument.")
Now people talk about castration as if it's a bad thing. But if we look at the storyline of Body Double, and the character arc of Jake Scully, as a complete whole, we can discern that his cuckolding/castrating constituted something of a liberating event. The betrayal deprives him of a "normal" monogamous relationship, and motivates him to jump off the wagon he's apparently been on (with no real ill effects over time, as it happens). But it frees him to self-actualize in a new way. He gets to wave his freak flag, wild and high, indulging in a voyeurism that, yes, will embroil him in a dangerous and horrific web of murder but will also turn him into a porn stud and mystery solver par excellence. And it is only after he accepts the notion that all human interactions of the putatively normal sort resolve in betrayals both ordinary and awful that he can conquer his phobia, regain the vampire part he was in fact fired from, and "get" the "girl," the girl here in the once-unlikely form of porn star Holly Body (Melanie Griffith). One assumes that Jake and Holly have a somewhat more "open" relationship than Jake and Carol did.
Let's also assume, for the moment, that aside from its value in gaining the confidence of would-be porn object Judy Bishop, Jon Rubin's story is also true, as it were. If so, the cuckolding/castration is also a defining moment in the making of a radical—in Mom, Rubin subsequently becomes politicized and emerges as a full-blown domestic terrorist. The undermining (as Wood has it) of the traditional male position forces the male to confront ideas, forces, and lures that he has never before contemplated. It gives birth, in a sense, to a new man, no longer an oppressor but a potential partner in the reimagining of societal norms.
APPENDIX: On learning that I was contemplating writing about Body Double, my old friend Joseph Failla e-mailed me these thoughts: ...[W]hile DePalma's detractors are probably on their steadiest ground with this film, DOUBLE does in fact comes across as a culmination of all his themes (voyeurism, violence, Hitchcock), indulgences, and excesses up to that point.
I'm sure you'll remember our jaw dropping expressions of disbelief when we first saw DOUBLE together. Starting with De Palma's idea of what a low budget vampire flick looks like, Dennis Franz's casting as that film's director with a vision (even then we noticed how much he resembled De Palma), Craig Wasson's wimpy lead performance, the villain basically identifying himself upon arrival, the ridiculously kinky sex scenes, the overly intricate tracking shots, the choice of electric power drill as murder weapon, and the hilarious moment when Frankie Goes to Hollywood shows up in the middle of the porn film within the film. Most unpardonable of all is De Palma's insistence at shoehorning his story into the well known frame work of Hitchcock classics (even going so far as to cast a supporting actor who's the spitting image of both Wendell Corey and Henry Jones,—"Nice save Scully!"), that whatever potential the narrative had to stand on its own was long gone before it got started. However, while acknowledging all of the above, I still find DOUBLE compulsively watchable and I've seen it at least as many times as his revered successes.
When we first heard that De Palma was going to explore the limits of censorship by setting his thriller in the world of pornography, there was no way that the film that was eventually released could ever match the movie we imagined. Even though we may have been disappointed in that respect (his work in GREETINGS and HI MOM! better addressed those themes), we enjoyed his technical audacity just the same. Something I wouldn't necessarily champion again until FEMME FATALE, which also felt totally fabricated, but in a much more inventive and satisfying fashion.
BTW, Melanie Griffith is quite good in the role intended for an actual adult film star; this, as you know, was years before Sasha Grey was given an opportunity to appear in a somewhat mainstream movie of her own.
The adult film star Joe refers to was Annette Haven, who DePalma never refers to by name in the making-of shorts included on the most recent DVD of Double. I'll have to look into this "Sasha Grey" character.
[It is an honor to have one of my personal heroes, film writer Glenn Kenny of the wonderful Some Came Running, contribute a piece with a unique perspective on De Palma's sexual predilections.]
In Brian De Palma's giddy, absurdist, radical early feature Hi, Mom, Robert De Niro plays a disturbingly disaffected young man named Jon Rubin. The character was introduced in DePalma's prior film, 1969's Greetings. He's an ardent voyeur and would-be filmmaker, and he's got an inspiration. He intends to invent gonzo porn some two decades avant le lettre by surreptitiously filming himself getting it on with woman from the building across from his own (a fantasy object he's discovered in his obsessive peeping, played by Jennifer Salt).
Of course, in order to make the scheme work, he's got to meet, attract, and seduce her first, which he does by putting on the mask of a sensitive square and inventing some malarkey about a computer date. Once he's gotten her out—they attend a double feature of David and Lisa and Porgy and Bess before going to dinner—he elicits her sympathy by relating this tale of woe: 
...to see his beloved Carol straddling Some Dude.
Oops! (Carol is, we note here, played by future Re-Animator scream queen Barbara Crampton, the ineffable love object of het perv cinephiles the world over.) DePalma here chooses to omit Some Dude's laugh and evil grin (although we did hear the laugh prior to discovery), but it's not really necessary. We get the idea like nobody's business.
And it is here that we turn to our good friend Robin Wood and his invaluable 1986 text Hollywood From Vietnam To Reagan. One of our favorite Woodsian devices is the bold-pronouncement-right-off-the-bat, as in "Scarface belongs with the comedies," and the opening of his Vietnam/Reagan chapter on DePalma does not disappoint in this respect: "Brian DePalma's interesting, problematic, frequently frustrating movies are quite obsessive about castration, either literal (Sisters, Dressed to Kill), or metaphorical (all the rest)." (An asterisk after this sentence leads us to this note: 'Since this chapter was written, Body Double [though it is far from being among DePalma's best films] has amply confirmed its [sic] argument.")
Now people talk about castration as if it's a bad thing. But if we look at the storyline of Body Double, and the character arc of Jake Scully, as a complete whole, we can discern that his cuckolding/castrating constituted something of a liberating event. The betrayal deprives him of a "normal" monogamous relationship, and motivates him to jump off the wagon he's apparently been on (with no real ill effects over time, as it happens). But it frees him to self-actualize in a new way. He gets to wave his freak flag, wild and high, indulging in a voyeurism that, yes, will embroil him in a dangerous and horrific web of murder but will also turn him into a porn stud and mystery solver par excellence. And it is only after he accepts the notion that all human interactions of the putatively normal sort resolve in betrayals both ordinary and awful that he can conquer his phobia, regain the vampire part he was in fact fired from, and "get" the "girl," the girl here in the once-unlikely form of porn star Holly Body (Melanie Griffith). One assumes that Jake and Holly have a somewhat more "open" relationship than Jake and Carol did.
Let's also assume, for the moment, that aside from its value in gaining the confidence of would-be porn object Judy Bishop, Jon Rubin's story is also true, as it were. If so, the cuckolding/castration is also a defining moment in the making of a radical—in Mom, Rubin subsequently becomes politicized and emerges as a full-blown domestic terrorist. The undermining (as Wood has it) of the traditional male position forces the male to confront ideas, forces, and lures that he has never before contemplated. It gives birth, in a sense, to a new man, no longer an oppressor but a potential partner in the reimagining of societal norms.
APPENDIX: On learning that I was contemplating writing about Body Double, my old friend Joseph Failla e-mailed me these thoughts:
Happy to see that another person caught this connection between "Hi, Mom!" and "Body Double"! When I watched "Hi, Mom!" about two weeks ago and listened to that monologue by Jon, the absolute first thing I thought of was Craig Wasson walking in on his wife. And both movies are about pornography, too.
ReplyDeleteI have not seen Body Double but I love Hi, Mom and am planning to include it in my own piece later in the blog-a-thon, which will also focus on De Palma's sexual predilections (along with his taste for violence, and various combinations thereof). I like that DeNiro's character is such a slippery customer - you say he puts on the mask of a sensitive square, which may be true, but we never really know WHAT he is, because he's always wearing some sort of mask - hip young filmmaker, creepy voyeur, political militant, sensitive square. Also, I don't take his cuckolding tale very seriously as the whole point is to reach a phony climax in which he reveals that this Some Dude (whose "evil grin" bares a striking resemblance to Jennifer Salt's identical description of the man who rather flippantly took her virginity) has the exact name as Salt's male enemy. And so they bond over their sexual humiliations at the hands of the same (in one case, fictional) scoundrel...
ReplyDeleteNice. Jon's smile at the end can most definately be interpreted as the smile of "Some Dude", to quote Mr. Kenny.
ReplyDeleteI have not seen Hi Mom, but Body Double to me was a pure "cheese fest". It was as if De Palma, tired of the critics being constantly at his neck, said "Ok guys i am gonna take Vertigo, Rear Window, and turn this into schlocky, cheese fest, do what you want". Almost like he was showing the middle finger to them. And more in part i guess for the shellacking he got for Scarface, critics went in expecting another Godfather, it was not, and i don't think BDP expected it to be either.
ReplyDeleteBut what really works for Body Double, is the secret of any good cheese flick,"Don't take yourself too seriously", which is what BDP did in the movie. You honestly won't be expecting Craig Wasson or Deborah Shelton, to win an Oscar for their acting. For that matter, Ms.Shelton's expressions when she is murdered in that power drill scene, were more comical than teriffying. But Body Double achieves its purpose of keeping the audience hooked till the end, it makes you keep asking "What next?", though somewhere you have all got it figured out.
Also loved the opening credits, against the movie set, the 60's shot of the hero driving in a car, hair intact, background scrolling away.