The Body Double Coda (Body Double) Body Double

The wind-down begins after the certainty already arrived

The audience-certainty has already landed at "I can help myself" inside the hallucinated Vampire's Kiss set.^b36 What follows — the shovel-grab pull-up, the dog leaping from the car window, Sam tumbling into the aqueduct current, Holly waking up — enacts what the test cleared the way for; none of it re-tests the protagonist's arc.^b38 The wind-down is a four-minute coda plus a long credits sequence, and it does two things at once.

Holly's grave-impasse is the rescued woman accusing the rescuer

When Holly comes to, she does not thank Jake. She asks "What are you doing?" and, in the argument that follows, stumbles into the grave herself. Jake reaches a hand down to help her out. Holly recoils: "Do not touch me. I'm not dead yet."^b39 The line is a dig — she has spent the previous scene calling him a corpse-fucker, a necrophiliac who only saved her because she was unconscious. The staging holds and the scene cuts without resolving them: him at the rim, her sitting in the grave. The film refuses Jake a romantic-comedy reconciliation with the woman he saved.

The structural point is sharp: the woman who has stood in for the murdered Gloria, played by the body double Holly Body, will not let Jake's rescue convert into the kind of relationship that would close the film cleanly. As Kael noted in her cooler review of the film:

"He stages the big scenes mechanically, without the zest that used to send them off." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1984)

The grave-impasse is one of those big scenes; De Palma stages it to refuse the audience the resolution they have been led to want, and to keep Holly's accusation hanging in the air as the cut takes us elsewhere.

The cut to the Vampire's Kiss shower with the fake bat

The hard cut goes to an obviously fake bat flying out of a window. A woman is in a shower. Jake — back in his vampire costume, his role restored — comes up behind her with his hands on her, about to bite. Rubin appears outside the window: "Freeze. Don't move your hand, Jake."^b40 The directorial freeze is the wind-down's defining gesture. Where the climax was a freeze Jake had to refuse to survive, this freeze is the working frame of his profession — a posture held for the camera, the actor instrumentalized. Jake gets the role back; the role is exactly this.

"It was not my intention to create a sexual image with the drill, although it could be construed that way." — Brian De Palma, Cinephilia & Beyond

De Palma's running refusal to adjudicate between sexualized-image-as-critique and sexualized-image-as-product is the engine of the closing minutes; the page on the drill murder sets out the same problem with a different prop.

The body-double process plays out across the credits

As the credits roll, the apparatus of substitution is shown step by step. A metal bar is rolled in and positioned between the actress and the camera — a physical line marking where the shot can and cannot go. Mindy, the actual body double, slides into the shower. She is plainly not the actress above the bar: brunette where the actress is blonde, older, less conventionally pretty, lower-class accent.^b40 The mismatch is deliberate; the bar exists precisely so the cut from face to body can survive it.

The camera drops below the bar to her breasts. Rubin: "OK, Jake... Quiet, please! I'm trying to think."^b40 Mindy is courteous and professional: "Be very, very careful, okay? My breasts are very tender. I got my period." The line, often cited as the film's last joke, is also the closest the wind-down comes to letting a woman speak as herself rather than as a stand-in.

Cut to Rubin in the director's chair. The camera pans to Holly Body sitting just behind him — dressed up, on her best Hollywood-party comportment — leaning forward to tell the swapped-out actress, kindly, "You're gonna get a lot of dates when this comes out."^b40 Holly Body has crossed into the legitimate set as a visiting professional; the porn-industry subplot (Holly Body and the Porn Industry Subplot) and the Vampire's Kiss set are not two different worlds.

The final intercut runs out over the credits: the actress's face, Jake in vampire behind her, the body double's breasts. Jake bites; blood pours down the body double's chest. That is the closing shot of the film.^b40

The wind-down argues two things simultaneously

At the level of the protagonist's arc, this is a clean better/sufficient validation. The post-midpoint approach (push through the freeze, act under stakes) has saved Jake's life, killed the antagonist, conquered the phobia, and restored the role. He finishes the take he could not finish in Beat 1.

At the level of the world the film is examining, the closing image is the apparatus of substitution and watching — the same structure the murder plot ran on — reproduced as a working day. The bar between camera and actress, the brunette body double smiling under the lens, the intercut that lets a face and a body belong to two different women, and the blood pouring down the wrong chest: each piece of the closing sequence is the voyeurism the film has been criticizing, set up cleanly and shot. As Roger Ebert put it in his (very different) reading:

"Body Double is an exhilarating exercise in pure filmmaking, a thriller in the Hitchcock tradition in which there's no particular point except that the hero is flawed, weak, and in terrible danger — and we identify with him completely." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (1984)

The wind-down's structural argument is dual and the film insists on both readings at once. Jake's arc closes in validation; the industry the film has been criticizing reproduces itself in the closing image as a working day. See The Hitchcock Connection and Themes and Analysis (Body Double) for the longer treatment of how De Palma engineers this kind of simultaneous reading.