Jake, a struggling actor, suffers a claustrophobic panic attack during a film shoot and is given the afternoon off to recover. He stops at a hot dog stand to pick up food for him and his girlfriend and, beaming ear-to-ear on a sunny LA afternoon, drives home. He bounds into the house and unloads the hot dogs on the table, placing them next to a custom-made neon light that illuminates the words “Jake ❤️Carol”. He hears a woman’s laughter from somewhere deep in the house, and he goes to find its source. A photo frame shows a woman, presumably Carol, Jake and a small dog posing together, Carol pulling at the dog’s ears. As Jake walks through the shadowy corridor, De Palma cuts between close-ups of his inquisitive face as he searches for Carol, and Jake’s POV as he enters each room, sharply rounding corners of doorways as if expecting to find her giggling alone in the kitchen or the spare room. As he reaches the bedroom, the last unchecked room in the house, the laughs have turned into moans. He opens the door and sees Carol having sex with another man. She’s on top of him, and doesn’t get off him when she sees Jake. She just looks down at the man beneath her, then defiantly back at Jake. He sheepishly backs out of the room, closing the door behind him.
Later, Jake lies to Sam, a friend of a friend, about what he saw. “Christ, I keep seeing it, Carol lying there. Her face was glowing.” Except that’s not how he found her. She wasn’t lying anywhere. She was on top and the man was lying down. This wasn’t a one-off slip of judgement. This wasn’t a mistake, or something to regret. She chose to have sex with someone else. She decided that this was something she wanted and, once she was discovered, made it clear to Jake that she had nothing to apologise for. This is a fairly low-stakes lie for Jake to tell. Sam is essentially a stranger, but Jake still feels inclined to tell the story this way. Maybe it’s easier for him to imagine Carol as someone who’d be dominated by another man than as someone with sexual desires that he couldn’t keep up with. On a day in which his impotence both as an actor and a man have been exposed, perhaps this lie is his first step to reclaiming some semblance of perceived masculinity, that by pretending his girlfriend was underneath someone else rather than on top he can process the pain of losing the woman he loves more easily. Perhaps this version of events wounds him less fatally.
This lie is such a perfect De Palma moment. An event shown subjectively through the POV of a witness and objectively through close-ups serve to confirm its veracity, while later having the same witness provide an alternate account of events, one that they can’t possibly have misconstrued, that exposes the brittle male ego of a man trying to control his own narrative. The entirety of Body Double in microcosm, and a fascinating precursor to the events that follow.