In some respects, Body Double may be the quintessential Brian De Palma film. This is not to say that it is his best, and it may not even mean that I even like the damn thing (there are too many clashing perceptions to sort out a coherent view on the first go). Instead, it summarizes the director's strengths and flaws to such an extreme that the film does not veer between brilliance and garbage so much as jump between the two without transition as if using wormholes for transportation. Only one film removed from Blow Out, Body Double develops the ideas of that film to their apex, mixing De Palma's anarchic form of brutalized Godardian experimentation with his corkscrewing thrillers.If Scarface represented a sort of warning shot across the studios' brow, Body Double is outright war. De Palma views his opening shots as a means of putting the audience on-guard, never easing them into a movie via what he views as the boring, wasteful helicopter shots of city skylines or montages of neighborhood life.* Here, he opens in such transparently schlocky terms that for once no one can seriously believe what we're watching is not a put-on. With dripping blood titles and midnight-feature mise-en-scène, De Palma goes for broke, establishing a film-within-a-film so unbelievably campy that it's all he can do not to walk out like Alfred Hitchcock at the start of The Wrong Man and warn the audience what they're in for.
