The Frankie Goes to Hollywood Sequence Body Double
De Palma embedded a full music video inside the film
Midway through Body Double, as Jake infiltrates the adult film industry to find Holly Body, the film detours into an extended sequence set to "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The sequence is staged as a music video — complete with theatrical lighting, choreography, and a surreal porn-set mise-en-scène — and it runs long enough to become its own self-contained piece of cinema.
De Palma credited MTV as the direct inspiration:
"I don't know where I got this idea to have this sort of porn music video, but I'd been watching a lot of MTV at that time because I was working on a script about Jim Morrison." — Brian De Palma, Stark Insider (2025)
The sequence was a real Frankie Goes to Hollywood music video
De Palma directed an actual music video for "Relax" that was shot alongside the film sequence. The band members appear on screen. This was a mutually beneficial arrangement: Frankie Goes to Hollywood got a video directed by a major filmmaker, and De Palma got a contemporary pop song that perfectly matched the film's themes of manufactured desire and excess.
"Relax" had been banned by the BBC earlier in 1984 for its sexual content — making it, by the time of the film's release, one of the most notorious pop songs in the world. The ban, of course, made it a massive hit. The song's themes (sexual release, losing control) mirror the film's own concerns, and the BBC ban echoed the MPAA's X-rating battle with De Palma over The Drill Murder.
De Palma was pushing the film's sexual content deliberately, knowing it would provoke a ratings fight:
"If this one doesn't get an X, nothing I ever do is going to. This is going to be the most erotic and surprising and thrilling movie I know how to make..." — Brian De Palma, cited in Lyman and Knapp (sourced via wikipedia, original book)
For five minutes the film becomes a music video, and that is the argument
For roughly five minutes, Body Double stops being a thriller and becomes a music video. The narrative doesn't pause — Jake is searching for Holly, and the sequence advances that plot — but the visual grammar changes completely. The lighting becomes garish. The editing syncs to the beat. The camera movements become choreographic rather than dramatic.
This formal rupture is deliberate. De Palma is demonstrating that film, music video, and pornography are all the same apparatus — a camera pointed at performing bodies, edited to create arousal (emotional, physical, or both). The "Relax" sequence makes this argument by being all three simultaneously.