Dark Nights for the Libido

By RICHARD CORLISS

Two new films brave the storm against violent sex

Porn is the theory; rape is the practice." This is the rallying cry of a new breed of activists convinced of a causal link between sexual violence in movies and the physical violence that men too often unleash on women. Aroused or desensitized by images of erotic domination, the argument goes, men may follow the examples set onscreen. Thus movies containing scenes of sexual violence are criminal violations--if not of the obscenity statutes, then of women's civil rights. And this applies to slasher movies like Friday the 13th and art-house hits like Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away as well as to heterosexual hard core. (Gay porn, in which men victimize men, would not be affected.) En garde! Out of the furnace of feminism springs a righteous protectionism that strikes with vigilante force.

Recently this argument has received support from some unlikely organs of the body politic. In Indianapolis the city council passed a law declaring that certain depictions of carnal mayhem were indeed civil rights violations. And psychologists at the University of Wisconsin released studies indicating that male subjects exposed to Friday the 13th, Swept Away and similar films did indeed assume the hostile attitudes of rapists. But now, leaping into the fray with the reckless assurance of kamikaze pilots, come two Hollywood films that confront the sexual-violence issue: Brian De Palma's Body Double and Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion.

The arrival of this lubricious pair just now is a coincidence, not the harbinger of a trend. In the main, Hollywood pictures since the mid-'70s have been sexually arid. Even the horny teen romps use the erotic impulse only as the setup for an anatomical punch line. Among the box-office hits of 1984, only the Clint Eastwood melodrama Tightrope had much to say about the dark night of the libido, and much of that was muffled under the bang-bang of a climactic chase. For that matter, De Palma and Russell are eccentric outsiders, and so are their new movies.

And so are their main characters. Body Double presents a familiar De Palma loner: a pleasant enough wimp who becomes fascinated, then sexually obsessed, with a faraway female figure. This time the wimp is Jack, a movie actor (Craig Wasson), and the love object is a wealthy young woman (Deborah Shelton) with a body as taut and talented as a porn star's. Too soon, Jack finds he must share the fantasy. Another man is watching, one who has more violent designs on the woman: murder by a power drill that moves toward her and through her like the phallus of death. As usual, De Palma tips his hat (and his hand) with Hitchcock allusions: Is this his third remake of Vertigo? As usual, the director's gliding camera announces its presence quietly but surely, like a cat on a carpet. His point here seems to be that voyeurism can induce a trancelike emotional paralysis--a message feminists could appreciate if Body Double took less pleasure in the mechanics of mutilation, and that ordinary moviegoers could ponder if the characters' motivations were not so numbingly nitwit. Upscale sleaze--so what else is new?

Body Double required only modest trimming to fit into the movie industry's R rating. Crimes of Passion nearly underwent evisceration. This story of a demure dress designer (Kathleen Turner) who is an uninhibited hooker by night was submitted four times to the ratings board. It finally received an R only after one entire sequence (involving the prostitute, a policeman and his nightstick), several other shots and some lines of dialogue were removed. (Wanted: a new rating, between R and X, for serious nonporn sex films. How about an S?) Even now, it is one steamy, and perversely compelling, picture, earning laughs halfway between a derisive snort and the bark of astonishment. Within the film's first few minutes, Russell and Screenwriter Barry Sandier have thrown every visual, verbal and sexual excess at the viewer. A played-out stripper dances while men masturbate at peepholes and a deranged preacher (Anthony Perkins) imagines her dead on the floor. The hooker dresses up in a tiara and a blue satin gown to play a beauty-pageant contender with an unusual talent. Neon flares like a headache in hell, and the screen seems caked with guilt and sweat.

At heart (and it has one), Crimes of Passion is about the sad, sybaritic pleasures embraced by men too old to grow up. And the hooker-dominatrix is really a dark angel who gives herself whole-bodied to her clients' midnight dreams. No less, Turner throws herself headfirst into the film, hyperventilating on the medium's potential for erogenous adventure. This is a clever, daring, mad performance in a movie that is just as reckless. Crimes of Passion and its more lurid brethren in the skin trade are not for everyone, but they should at least be available for any consenting adult to savor or condemn. The porn vigilantes ignore two important partners in a work of fiction: the filmmaker, whose point of view explains and may even criticize the violent acts he depicts; and the moviegoer, who may just be perceptive enough to realize that what is happening on screen is merely a persuasive game of let's pretend. Movies did not create the problem of sexual violence. Suppressing them will not solve it. --By Richard Corliss