A friend was commenting the other day on how good Brian De Palma is with actors to which my response was, ‘is he? He’s certainly great with great actors. But have you seen Craig Wasson in BODY DOUBLE’? Jake Scully is a great role, the cuckolded nebbish wannabee who breaks down in acting class, gets to be a vampire, styles up for an MTV video with Frankie goes to Hollywood, and even goes porno.  And I found him completely charmless throughout, a chore to watch. He certainly didn’t get to do much of note after its release, whereas it re-launched Melanie Griffith’s career, whose performance is what I best remembered from the film, funny and true. The film is about mediated experience, through various media and through different forms of voyeurism. It’s a kind of transmogrification of Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958), but without the emotion, excitement or complexity. It’s got great moments of thrilling filmmaking (the opening and ending, the scenes at the mall, the beach, the burial, the voyeurism across the canyon). It also functions as a kind of metacinema (the uses of rear projection and their revelation, the video shop, the contrast and connection between low-budget slasher and porn, its satire on LA’s surface image culture). One can make a case for it as a great movie, and of course people have. But I do sometimes think that contemporary criticism, with its access to viewing and reviewing, re-winding, the ability to detach scenes from movies, to stop the film’s unfolding of time etc. create different types of experiences, and that critics sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees they so intensely obsess over. I remembered Melanie Griffitsh so vividly that I’d forgotten she only appears almost two thirds into the film, when it all of a sudden comes alive. Also, alongside the dazzling filmmaking, there is something derivative, and by this I mean that the Hitchcockian in BODY DOUBLE achieves only the surface effects without the underlying depth and complexity of sometimes contradictory feeling Hitchcock draws out. There’s something crude, lewd, and sleazy about the whole enterprise here. The power drill scene, a riff on the chainsaw scene in SCARFACE (1983), is milked for all its considerable sexual connotations. It’s funny but only if you put aside the extraordinary misogyny that underpins it. In AMERICAN PSYCHO Brett Easton Ellis makes of BODY DOUBLE serial killer Patrick Bateman’s favourite and most watched movie. It’s not hard to see why.

José Arroyo