Holly Body and the Porn Industry Subplot Body Double

Holly Body collapses the line between Hollywood and pornography

The second half of Body Double moves Jake Scully out of the Hitchcock-homage thriller and into the Los Angeles pornography industry. To find the woman who performed the erotic dance in Gloria's window, Jake auditions for a porn film.^{b22 b23} This structural pivot — from Hitchcock pastiche to porn-world detective story — is the most radical thing about the film.

Griffith plays Holly as a professional who sees through everyone else's pretensions

Melanie Griffith (in Body Double, as actor) plays Holly Body as a working professional who does her job, knows her worth, and has no patience for pretension. In a film full of deception, Holly is the only character who is exactly what she appears to be. She's honest about her work, her body, and her motivations. The porn actress turns out to be the most authentic person in a story about Hollywood illusion.

Griffith understood the character as something larger than the exploitation framework critics assumed:

"I know she's a controversial figure, but she pertains to women in all areas. She's proud of what she does and she's not affected by what people think. This is a means to an end for her. She does what she does and she does it the best. She's a business woman, first of all." — Melanie Griffith, The Morning Call (1984)

Brian De Palma (in Body Double, as director) cast Griffith specifically for what she brought to the film's second half:

"Griffith brought a comic edge that I wanted to be a major part of the tone of the second half of the movie." — Brian De Palma, The Philadelphia Inquirer (1984) (paywalled, not verified)

Griffith's performance crackles with energy in scenes where the rest of the film is deliberately languid and controlled. Her scenes with Craig Wasson (in Body Double, as actor) have a comic charge — she's smarter than Jake, more self-possessed, and completely unimpressed by him. Vincent Canby singled her out in the New York Times:

"She gives a perfectly controlled comic performance that successfully neutralizes all questions relating to plausibility... What is new is the self-assured screen presence she demonstrates here, and it's one of the delights of Body Double." — Vincent Canby, The New York Times (October 26, 1984) (paywalled; quoted in Wikipedia)

De Palma used the porn industry as a mirror for Hollywood

Griffith saw the film's real target clearly:

"It is a parody of Hollywood more than anything." — Melanie Griffith, The New York Times (1984) (paywalled, not verified)

The film's structural argument is that mainstream Hollywood and the adult film industry are engaged in the same enterprise — selling fantasies built on the display of bodies — and that the only difference is respectability. De Palma stages the argument three ways. First, the Vampire's Kiss shoot that opens the film (Rubin directing Jake in the coffin) and the porn shoot in the second act (Corso directing Jake on Body Talk) are structurally identical director-actor encounters — same impatient authority, same body-on-display setup, only the budget and the genre label differ.^{b1 b23 b25} Second, the closing scene returns to Vampire's Kiss — the same legitimate production that opened the film — and stages the body-double mechanism as a working day: a metal bar is rolled in, Mindy (brunette, older, plainly not the blonde lead) steps in for the breast shot, and Holly Body, the porn star Jake met in the middle, is dressed up in the director's-chair tableau leaning over to tell the swapped-out lead actress "You're going to get a lot of dates when this comes out."^b40 The porn industry is folded into the working day on the legitimate horror set in two registers at once — the unknown working-class body double inside the shot, the porn star as visiting professional outside it. Third, the line "I like to watch" works identically in the audition for the porn film and in the porn film itself — the audience hears it as confession and as scripted dialogue and cannot tell the difference. The argument is carried by the casting, the scene rhymes, and the closing image — not by one actor playing both directors.

The "Relax" music video sequence bridges the two worlds

The centerpiece of the porn subplot is an extended sequence set to "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. De Palma stages it as a full music video within the film, with Jake navigating a surreal, theatrical porn set. The sequence is deliberately excessive — gaudy, artificial, and hypnotic — and serves as the moment where the film's genre distinctions (thriller / music video / porn) collapse entirely. See The Frankie Goes to Hollywood Sequence.