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Kitschy Goddesses, Voyeurism and Melancholia 


representations of female sexuality in Brian De Palma's 

Body Double (1984)  and The Black Dahlia (2006)


by

Helen Donlon












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“Does she do this a lot?”

“Like clockwork, every night . . .”

Body Double (1984)


Brian de Palma has been called “the master of modern suspense” because he is considered perhaps the foremost successor to Alfred Hitchcock, and certainly in English language cinema.  He reprises and prepensely remasters many Hitchcockian tropes, notably in his representation of violence as a shocking, angry and personal manifestation, and often where the victim is a single beautiful female protagonist.  Also like Hitchcock, his women are often veiled in mystery; seductive femmes fatales with a manifestly cunning and sexually complicated side.  Or else they are consummately vulnerable and somewhat two-dimensional beauties, with hearts of gold and the need for heroes. 


With a stellar and exciting body of work behind him already, a brand new hard-hitting and highly controversial film about Iraq on general release (Redacted, 2007), and a prequel to The Untouchables (Capone Rising, 2008) now in pre-production, Brian De Palma is a potential behemoth for film students.  But in this short study, I’d like to take a closer look at a few of his female characters, and with specific reference to two of his films, Body Double (1984) and The Black Dahlia (2006), to talk a little about the arrayal of these characters.


Despite there being a 22 year period between Body Double and The Black Dahlia it is easy to see quite a few key plot and style attributes.  Both feature almost Hammer Horror posturing in parts, but are tempered by a drawn out dramatic tension, punctuated with violent acts of misogyny, that never quite climaxes but instead ends on a nod and a wink.  It’s difficult to assess whether or not he even gets away with this untraditional denouement, but either way both films offer a compelling perspective on Hollywood noir.


The opening to Body Double is both kitsch shock-horror, and homage.  Protagonist Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) is a low budget movie vampire who suffers from claustrophobia although in this opening scene he is being filmed  inside a closed coffin, and is starting to have a panic attack as a result.  He is staring at the camera, at us.  This is homage to the opening scene panic attack of James Stewart in Vertigo.  Then the voice of a director in the background is shouting, “Action!  And cut!”  Now we are immediately back in De Palma territory:  acting, egos and desert landscapes being revealed as wheel-around props.  This is all to remind us that it’s ok to exhale, that the horror is staged.  The film continues from this scene on to unfold into a casserole made up of  Hitchcock plot citations (notably Vertigo, Dial M For Murder and Rear Window) and a Brian De Palma cabaret of voyeurism.  Body Double was once called the only original American giallo, and one can see why at first glance.


De Palma is unapologetic in his theatricality, which so often borders on pop opera/musical that many critics and fans are deterred by the apparent lack of seriousness.  Howard Hawks fans were already a legion of the unwilling after De Palma’s audacious remake of the Hawks classic, Scarface (1983).  Body Double came hot on the heels of Scarface, and baffled most mainstream viewers at the time, although it has remained a cult classic to this day.  It certainly prepared Melanie Griffith for her role in Mike Nichols’ Working Girl (1988), as nearly every line or facial expression she uses in Body Double as the zesty vamp, Holly Body (short perhaps for Hollywood Body) is replicated in the Nichols’ film, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.


Nonetheless, she is having a lot of fun in Body Double, on the set of the porn feature that she stars in, prancing around butt naked and knowingly gorgeous in her slightly wasted but in-control waifishness.  All the women shine in this film, regardless of their fates, starting with the first important female to appear, Carol (Barbara Crampton), playing Scully’s girlfriend, who we find romping on top of another man in their apartment (in fact hers, hence he is homeless from the moment he discovers her mid-cuckoldry).  She says nothing when he walks in on her , but looks at him in an ‘oh well, this guy’s bigger and better’ way, which brazen hussiness apparently renders him poor old Jake for the rest of the film.  This is a moment clearly homaged later by Paul Thomas Anderson in Boogie Nights.  In any case, Scully’s discovery sets the poor, benighted character off on a path which is destined to be crossed by two strong female cinema archetypes:  Deborah Shelton as the Hitchcockian sophisticate Gloria Revelle, then her counterpart, Holly Body (Griffiths).


Body Double’s two featured production sets are either crawling with vampires or porno actors or both.  So the contrast between this and the gated, glamorous, albeit doomed world of a beautiful bejewelled Hollywood wife, who performs her own private sex trance rituals, dancing at the same time every night in front of her Hollywood Hills window, is unnaturally heightened.  The sudden and brutal enactment of her murder, witnessed by Scully who is now the ‘peeping tom’, but unable to save her, seems therefore over the top.


So much of Body Double is Hitchcock meets 80s brashness, that it is almost surreal in parts.  The smoke and mirrors slant of the film brings us time and again back to the peeping tom/voyeur themes which is a De Palma trademark, but, importantly, reminds us that all presentation is part of a palimpsest.  So, for example, while many have attacked, perhaps with reason the overtly violent aspects of De Palma’s framing of female characters in this and several other films of his, one rarely gets to read about the sheer enjoyment of being seduced by these libertines.  It is very far from the political correctness which flattened several avenues for women in Hollywood come the 1990s, a political correctness that has its place, for sure.  It also means that to go back more than twenty years later and discover the kind of soft porn scenes that are liberally scattered about in Body Double and in which the women are doing it for themselves, and really, really enjoying their bodies is not only great entertainment, but well, a relief. 


During Jake Scully’s audition scene for a role in a hardcore low budget film opposite Griffith’s character Holly Body, Griffith oozes her trademark charming vulnerability with brio. This leads them into a long sensual kiss during which De Palma cuts back and forth to the earlier kiss we have seen Scully and Revelle fall into passionately at the door of the tunnel by the beach.  The contrast between the women is now striking.  In Revelle’s scene we have the wistful music of Pino Donaggio,  the natural breezes of the almost Rothko-esque minimal beach colours and a coiffed and manicured Revelle dressed in white silk.  She appears a somewhat passive female versus Holly Body’s backdrop of disco lights, in a sweaty indoor arena, with mirrors and cameras everywhere.  In this latter scene Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Holly Johnson is performing “Relax” live on the porno set.  Holly Body is very much the unsophisticated femme: a porn star, dressed all in black leather but bare-assed.  This representation of Griffith is almost comical when you realise that in the beach kiss scene Shelton so very much resembles Tippi Hedren in her Hitchcockian attire, and here in the Frankie Goes To Hollywood scene is Hedren’s daughter playing the De Palma vamp in sharp juxtaposition.  As Vincent Canby in the New York Times stated at the time of the film’s initial US release, “Miss Griffith gives a perfectly controlled comic performance that successfully neutralizes all questions relating to plausibility . . .  the self- assured screen presence she demonstrates here is one of the delights of 'Body Double.' ”


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The Black Dahlia was De Palma’s most recent film before Redacted and was cast by the highly respected Johanna Ray (casting agent for David Lynch) who is always talented at finding very interesting camera-ready faces.  This time she brought Scarlett Johansson, Mia Kirshner, Hilary Swank and Fiona Shaw to the De Palma table.   And while the superb casting of and performances by Aaron Eckhart, Josh Hartnett and John Kavanagh take centre stage in much of the film, especially in the first half an hour in the case of Eckhart and Hartnett, it is the women who shine through and vaporise every spare space in the picture eventually. 


The cinematography, by the gifted Vilmos Zsigmond, is light and lush and highly stylised, and recreates a perfectly fantastic Hollywood, albeit that the film was in fact shot in Bulgaria. 


The script is mostly sassy, slick and strong: “The basic rule of homicide applied: Nothing stays buried forever – corpses, ghosts…nothing stays buried for ever, nothing!” Written by Josh Friedman and fictionally based on James Ellroy’s novel of the same name (the novel itself based on the true life case of murdered runaway Elizabeth Short) the film’s wistful characterisation of the golden age of Hollywood, with its kitschy and meta-cinematic underbelly is typical De Palma. 


It employs a whole set of De Palma memes.  A horror theatricality (again) which is apparently borrowed as equally from Dario Argento as it is from Hitchcock… and as it is from De Palma himself.  The staircase homicide double-act is a clear homage to his own Scarface, itself mirrored in Argento’s beautifully balletic Suspiria.  There is the classic De Palma-esque voyeur’s eye.  The actor looking directly at us and into the camera, with the camera often following the protagonist as if led by the hand is employed beautifully here, especially in the scene where Hilary Swank gets Josh Hartnett home to meet her almost ridiculously theatrical Anglo-Celt family, a gang of super-pervs of the highest order.


Hilary Swank is probably the star of The Black Dahlia, just for sheer force of her screen presence, although her character is introduced not only as a wannabe Dahlia, therefore a prescribed second to Mia Kirshner, who is already a serious second in the credits to the less interesting Scarlet Johansson. Swank walks, or rather sashays into the film bang in the middle of the beautifully choreographed and louchely lazy bar scene where k.d. lang performing a live version of Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” creates a gilded lily of a tableau which is all about what, or who isn’t in it: The Dahlia.  Undeterred, Swank walks the walk and when followed into the car park talks the talk to her immediately hapless infatuee, Detective Bucky Bleichert (Hartnett). 


A “rich bitch with a taste for the low life”, Swank’s character Madeleine Linscott is the daughter of a prominent local family with, as it turns out, darker than dark connections.  Swank, in appearance a dark and menacingly gorgeous version of the young Barbara Hershey, plays the indulged daddy’s girl, the vixen who enjoys slumming it with gusto and disdain in equal measure.  She is perfectly camp when it is called for, desperate and clingy when hurt, and can pull off aristocratic hauteur in a way extremely few contemporary US actresses can.


After inviting the instantly seduced Hartnett to visit her at home the next night, (“Bucky?  I’ll try to remember. . .,” she purrs lasciviously after he introduces himself), she pulls him coyly into her family house, where colonial gothic is the ruling aesthetic.  The first thing they pass is a stuffed former family dog, still with a copy of the LA Times in its mouth from the day Madeleine’s overexcited father allegedly shot him.


For sheer gothic though, it is Fiona Shaw as Madeleine’s mother, Ramona Linscott, who steals the show, albeit with a delivery pitched at the highest camp possible.  Despite her few lines, she performs her part with a cloying migraine of discomfort at just being in the presence of her own family; a discomfort that turns to sociopathy bordering on performance art most of the time.  Yet it is deeply compelling, if a little ridiculous, because as a performance it is so strong and determined.  We feel her pain and disgust before we can even put a name to it.  Her eventually revealed complicity in the Dahlia’s murder comes as a horrible shock and yet not as a surprise, and any feelings we have at the moment of her eventual demise are rendered redundant because she has out-felt us all.  When Shaw moves it is with the stiffest of necks, the most stuffed of nostrils, an eagle-eyed madness extending to her gnarled and insensible nether limbs.


And Madeleine herself is destined for a trademark violent demise (cf. Gloria in Body Double) after layer upon layer of her complicity in the Dahlia’s downfall becomes apparent.  “I’ve worked hard to be…loose, but the way people described Betty, was like she was a natural,” she craves, wistfully. It’s an interesting line.   For all her wealth, and the eccentricity of her genuinely decadent family, she needs the mainstream, dark but dumb version of libertinism.  The hankering is her downfall, of course.


Kay Lake, the good girl, or rather the ‘tart with a heart’ of The Black Dahlia is performed by the divine-bodied Scarlett Johansson, who, other than that and her ability to emulate screen goddess goodness in static shots, is utterly devoid of charisma and, more trenchantly, is wholesomely danger-free.  The blonde pneumatic Snow White in Max Factor lipstick provides the safe zone for both Bleichert and his partner Detective Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart, permanently pissed off in a sexily jittery way) to keep scurrying home to.  She’s almost always at home in the film, cooking and flicking through newspapers or having hot baths in well-lit bathrooms, her cigarette holder perched unconvincingly in her mitts as she sighs from room to room a tad flouncily and with an annoyingly persistent lip twitch, which self-consciousness actively detracts from her beauty.  And she is therefore the one who allows them both to be the hero, when needs be, and that’s the part she plays well.


She is scarred, visibly.  Her previous partner, a thug, had her branded with his initials, and this body carving – one of many that feature in The Black Dahlia – is a constant reminder to Detective Lee Blanchard with whom she lives, of the tortured victimy past he rescued her from. 


Going meta, it is also a reminder of the sister he had who was allegedly murdered at the age of 15, a crime in which “they never caught the guy” . . . More meta still, James Ellroy’s mother was murdered in a date-rape incident when he was a boy and the incident not only haunted him all his life, but caused him to become possessed by curiosity about  “the Black Dahlia” unsolved murder mystery, and hence to the book, and hence . . . enter De Palma.  “The Black Dahlia” was a Bostonian runaway called Elizabeth Short.  She became nicknamed the Black Dahlia after the Raymond Chandler-scripted Alan Ladd film, The Blue Dahlia, and because she allegedly wore black much of the time.


The first time we see Short (Mia Kirshner), apart from the presence of an obscured corpse in the pathology room a good 30 minutes into the film, is when Bucky gets hold of her audition reels.  The auditions are all for privately-commissioned porno (back to Holly Body territory), though she has held loftier ambitions.  David O. Selznick, has been “very very very kind to me.  He’s taken me out to such beautiful dinners in fancy restaurants,” she says, as she pulls a net veil away from her face, revealing herself clearly, and starting her audition by performing her Scarlett O’Hara impersonation to an off-screen interviewer (the instantly recognisable voice of De Palma himself, in fact).


Mia Kirshner is a breathtaking beauty.  Raven-haired and almost transparently pale-skinned, she has eyes that are so big and kind that she almost looks blind.  She has a disarmingly universal vulnerability about her (as opposed to Griffith’s vulnerability in Body Double which while effective is utterly her own). 


Bucky is mesmerised by Kirshner.  The first show-reel he watches throws her naïve charm into relief after he has escaped from a kitscher than kitsch Rose McGowan, herself a link in the chain of wannabe starlets about town. “Darling…I’m IN!”  McGowan says, of her movie career status, when he questions it, but she is just another opportunist, and another girl for hire.   


It is after seeing Kirshner as Elizabeth Short that Bleichert falls for Madeleine Linscott, Swank’s character, because she resembles her so much (according to the script). Every scene where Bleichert is watching Short onscreen he seems to shrink in size, as he is so stilled by her virtual presence. Short is of course the saddest, most tarnished and victimised character in the whole story.  The final torture scenes in which she facially pours out her crumbling soul straight into the camera, a face telling of such base existence as her life has become, is perhaps the hardest moment of the film.  Kirshner has an interesting mouth. It often looks fixed on the verge of tears, but, like Ramona Linscott’s clown painting (one of the story’s leitmotifs), she is adept at pulling it back from despondency and despair into a last gasp smile.  Later of course Ramona will see the smile is replicated from the clown to the Dahlia’s face for all eternity.


In both The Black Dahlia and Body Double, beautiful (if a little pushy) soundtracks provide thematic motifs to keep us bound to the plot. The soundtrack to The Black Dahlia was provided by veteran Mark Isham, and his use of trumpet adds to the general sense of the wistfulness of Hollywood of the period1946/7.  The other major musical set-up in the film is the scene where Bleichert meets Linscott for the first time, and this scene is the one guided by k.d.lang in a music promo type interlude, harking back to the interlude in Body Double when Jake Scully finally meets with Holly Body in person.


k.d.lang and Holly Johnson effectively play the same role, one per film.  In The Black Dahlia it is k.d. who commands centre stage in the music video bit of the film, paralleling exactly the type of cameo played by Holly Johnson who performs with Frankie Goes to Hollywood  in Body Double.  Both scenes take place in a club setting suggesting audition (or vice versa), and both feature the male protagonist coming face to face with the sexual femme/siren.  In Dahlia this is Hilary Swank, and in Body Double it is Melanie Griffith.  Interestingly both scenes feature sexual foreplay being acted out all around a set heavily-inflected with homoerotic context as a backdrop to a heterosexual, lust-driven courtship.


If there is a good girl/bad girl dichotomy in the two films, then on the good girl front Johanssen’s glamorous and well-coiffed Kay surely matches Deborah Shelton’s Gloria Revelle, the well-kept, feminine proto-Hitchcockian maiden (though more Doris Day than Tippi Hedren).  Both remain dignified in their roles, even despite explicit or suggested violent interventions which would destroy less zipped personae.  And Swank’s rebel with a cause (a family that makes the Addams Family look like the Brady Bunch) surely matches the home-girl gone tawdry allure of Melanie Griffith as Holly Body.  Griffith is fun and funky in black leather.  Johansson’s entire wardrobe on the other hand is one or another shade of blonde in The Black Dahlia, perhaps as a direct contrast to Mia Kirshner and Hilary Swank’s shared love of the dark.


Neither of these films will go down in cinematic history as great classics of their genre, but revisiting them in light of the current Redacted scandal is interesting and informative. In any case, for the next few months the name De Palma is going to be all about Redacted, and redaction.  And the war.  And men.  And real intelligence and political astuteness, and how he is being in this very moment censored and attacked for it.  A quick glance over our shoulders though at some of his women, be they Snow White or Rose Red, real or simulacra, reminds us of just another interesting, once-renowned side of the same guy . . .



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Helen Donlon

email: hdonlon@well.com



Poster photos courtesy of Columbia Pictures

December 2007