Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat is a quintessential example of neo-noir film, partly because it was so self-consciously constructed to recall the original noir cycle, especially Double Indemnity (1944), of which it is a virtual remake. Indeed, Body Heat is largely a clever reconstruction, including almost all of the major elements of Double Indemnity, though slightly displacing most of them. It is, for example, set in South Florida at the beginning of the 1980s, rather than Southern California in the mid-1940s. Body Heat adds a few additional plot twists, but none that would be out of character in an original noir film. It also adds a few new atmospheric effects, such as the heat wave that keeps most of the characters drenched in sweat throughout most of the film. The most striking “revision” in Body Heat is its much more overt portrayal of sexual behavior, enabled by the collapse of the Production Code. Central to this portrayal is the role played by Matty Walker, this film’s femme fatale. Ultimately, Body Heat gains much of its energy from its nostalgic look back at film noir, especially Double Indemnity, while doing nothing to engage the original noir cycle in a critical way.
Body Heat begins with a flurry of brief scenes that introduce most of the main characters. In the first scene, me meet attorney Ned Racine (William Hurt)—who plays essentially the same role in this film that Fred MacMurray’s insurance agent Walter Neff had played in Double Indemnity. However, whereas Neff seems to be leading a lonely, spartan existence when he first meets femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), Body Heat quickly establishes Racine as something of a womanizer in this first scene, which takes place in his apartment after he has just had casual sex with a woman in whom he seems to have no interest other than sexual. We next see Racine in the courtroom, where he seems a bit overmatched by Assistant District Attorney Peter Lowenstein (Ted Danson), thus establishing that Racine’s competence as a lawyer might be a bit questionable, a wrinkle not really present in Double Indemnity, where Neff is perfectly competent. Finally, a quick scene in a diner (a classic noir setting) establishes that Racine and Lowenstein are actually friends outside the courtroom.
In the film’s first major scene, Racine spots Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner), this film’s film fatale (and really its most important character)[1]. Matty immediately grabs Racine’s attention, and he sets out to try to seduce her, further establishing his predilection for casual encounters. The two then engage in an exchange of snappy, suggestive dialogue that is highly reminiscent of the first exchange between Neff and Dietrichson. After Matty has skillfully parried his initial pickup lines, Racine tells her, “I need tending. I need someone to take care of me, someone to rub my tired muscles, smooth out my sheets.” “Get married,” Matty tells him, to which he immediately quips, “I just need it for the night,” causing her to do a spit take with the snow cone he has just bought for her. He seems to have scored a hit, and her subsequent half-hearted attempts to play hard-to-get barely slow him down as he barrels forward into a full-blown affair with her.
Of course, we will later realize that Matty has carefully engineered this early encounter—and their whole affair—in order to achieve the nefarious end of employing Racine to murder her husband for her. This affair is conducted mostly at the posh mansion Matty shares with her husband, shadowy “investor” Edmund Walker (Richard Crenna), who conveniently spends most of his time out of town to attend his mysterious business affairs. Meanwhile, the steamy love scenes that indicate the torrid nature of the affair are portrayed with a frankness that would not have been possible under the Production Code. These scenes helped to make an immediate star of Turner, who was performing in her first film and who quickly became known as one of Hollywood’s sexist actresses. In 1995, Empire magazine named her one of the 100 sexiest movie stars of all time, and it is safe to say that Body Heat contributed more to that ranking than did any other film. Indeed, while Racine is the principal point-of-view character in the film, it is very much dominated by Turner’s performance as Matty, who breathlessly vamps (and camps) her way through the film in high film-fatale fashion, always a step ahead of Racine as she ensnares him in her plot to murder her husband and inherit his substantial wealth.
It is for good reason that Foster Hirsch, who sees Body Heat as the film that established neo-noir as a definite category once and for all, emphasizes Matty as the aspect of this film that makes it most remarkable. For him, Matty is a somewhat “modernized” version of the classic femme fatale, with “greater agency and initiative” than the typical femme fatale of the original noir cycle. In addition, he notes the clearly “performative” aspect of Matty’s behavior—she is clearly always playing a role as she manipulates men by gauging their idea of the ultimate in feminine desirability and then acting out that idea. The result, for Hirsch, is that Matty is so skillful and so clever that it is difficult not to admire her artistry, even as we realize what a predator she is: “Matty is both a threat and a warning to the unwary male, but she is at the same time a figure whose sheer cleverness as a performer is meant to elicit an approving smile” 182–83). Linda Ruth Williams agrees, identifying Body Heat as the beginning of a cycle of neo-noir “erotic thrillers,” in which the female leads enjoyed unprecedented sexual freedom, often without being punished for it. Thus, Turner’s Matty was the clear forerunner of such figures as Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) in Basic Instinct (1992) or Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) in The Last Seduction (1994) (170).
I also agree with Hirsch’s assessment of Matty as a character, though I would suggest that the machinations of Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity can be quite entertaining as well. In addition, I would argue that the difference between Matty and Phyllis is not a fundamental one within their films that would lead us to reassess our view of the femmes fatales of the original noir films. Instead, Matty’s greater agency is largely a reflection of changing social norms between 1944 and 1981, so that Matty has the same relationship to what was regarded as “normal” feminine behavior in 1981 as Phyllis had to the same norm in 1944. The same might be said for the neo-noir femmes fatales that followed her, such as Trammell and Gregory. And it is, of course, their differences from the expected norm that make the femmes fatales stand out as characters.
Among other things, Matty’s plotting is even more complex than Phyllis’s. Her plot leads to Edmund’s death slightly more than halfway through the film, but Matty’s machinations are at this point only just getting started. Unknown to Racine, she forges a fake will for her husband, attributing its preparation to Racine. The will leaves half of Edmund’s wealth to Matty and half to his young niece Heather (Carola McGuiness), which was, in fact, what Edmund had wished to do. But Matty has carefully prepared the will with a fatal flaw due to its violation of the basic legal principle of the “rule against perpetuities” (which serves, in this film, the same purpose as the insurance concept of “double indemnity” in Double Indemnity). Thanks to Racine’s questionable reputation as a lawyer, the idea that he would have made such an error seems perfectly believable, especially as he himself, though shocked by the will, does not deny having prepared it.
Ultimately Matty’s maneuvers will help to send Racine to prison for Edmund’s murder, though she fails in her attempt to murder Racine himself, while succeeding in faking her own death. Meanwhile, the extent of Matty’s plotting is only revealed after Racine does extensive research while in prison, discovering that Matty was not even Matty, but another woman by the name of Mary Ann Simpson, having stolen the identity of the real Matty Tyler to further her plan to marry and murder Edmund, and having meanwhile murdered the real Matty after she discovers the switch. We learn about most of this additional plotting (analogous to the revelation late in Double Indemnity of Phyllis’s apparent murder of her previous husband as well) in an exposition scene in which Racine, now in prison, explains his theory to a skeptical police detective, Oscar Grace (J. A. Preston). Racine, it seems, has spent much of his time in prison trying to unravel the case, though he will not get the final piece of evidence he needs until slightly later than his talk with Grace. In short, the plot at this point becomes so tangled and complex that Kasdan felt someone within the film had to explain it to avoid confusing the audience altogether.
The complexity of the plot of Body Heat can be taken as a reference to the similarly complex plots of Double Indemnity and many other original noir films. Body Heat refers to those films in other ways as well, as in its jazzy soundtrack or the 1930s-style script of its opening and closing credits. Kasdan’s film also includes a number of moments of odd inserted moments of gratuitous strangeness, completed unrelated to the plot. At one point, for example, Racine observes a man in full clown makeup driving through the town. And, of course, there is Lowenstein’s propensity toward dancing, as when he performs a full dance routine near the beach while waiting to meet with Racine[2].
At times, Body Heat includes moments that comment on film noir in a way that adds a bit of humor, especially for knowing viewers. For example, in one scene, Racine and Matty have been summoned to a meeting to discuss the problematic will with Miles Hardin (Michael Ryan), Edmund’s lawyer. Lowenstein, and Roz Craft (Lanna Saunders), Heather’s mother, have been also been called to the meeting. As the discussion begins to reach a crucial point, Hardin asks if anyone minds if he smokes. When no one speaks up, he takes out a cigar and lights it up. By this time, though, he has also triggered a chain of events in which, first, Matty, and then Roz and Racine take out cigarettes and begin smoking them. When Roz offers a cigarette to Lowenstein, though, he declines, saying, “I don’t need my own. I’ll just breathe the air.” It’s a funny moment in itself, but it is much funnier if one realizes that the films of the original noir cycle are notorious for the frequency with which their characters smoke, making this scene a sly and amusing nod to the noir roots of Body Heat.
At the same time, this amusing nod to the original film noir cycle is also something of an anachronism: the characters in this film smoke like they live in the time of Double Indemnity, not in the time of Body Heat, when widespread concerns over the health effects of smoking—emphasized in important reports from the U.S. Surgeon General in 1964 and 1972—had already begun to decrease the prevalence of smoking in American society. Some aspects of Body Heat would have never occurred in the original noir cycle, such as the fact that Grace, the principal police detective investigating the murder of Edmund Walker, Grace happens to be a good friend of Racine, which seems odd in terms of conflicts of interest, but Grace is also an African American, which (especially in a Southern state) would seem much more likely in the 1980s than the 1930s. But, in addition to all the smoking, other aspects of Body Heat play with the fact that they would seem more at home in Double Indemnity, such as the nod to original noir in the 1930s-style hat that Matty gives Racine as a gift, or the times when the cinematography overtly mimics films noir, but now casting the famous parallel lines of shadow on the bodies of lovers. Meanwhile, one key anachronism is key to the whole feel of the film—the lack of effective air conditioning, so that even the wealthy Walkers don’t seem to have decent air conditioning in their palatial home (and creating the constant heat and sweat that are so important in this film).
Body Heat’s lack of firm attachment to its own historical period is crucial to what has been probably the most influential reading of the film, Jameson’s centering of it as a key example of neo-noir as nostalgia film. For Jameson,
“Everything in the film … conspires to blur its official contemporaneity and make it possible for the viewer to receive the narrative as though it were set in some eternal thirties, beyond real historical time. This approach to the present by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage” (Jameson, Postmodernism 21).
For Jameson, Body Heat’s pastiche of Double Indemnity divorces it from its own historical moment and from historicity in general because it makes no attempt to engage its predecessor in a critical dialogue that would draw attention to the historical differences between the different time periods in which the films were made and set.
Building on Jameson’s analysis, Carl Freedman notes both the similarities and the differences between Body Heat and Double Indemnity, arguing that this combination of imitation and revision makes Body Heat one of “the most purely and precisely neo-noir of all films” (65). For Freedman, the most important revision is “Kasdan’s determined erasure of the whole problematic of labour, business and economic activity that is so important for Double Indemnity” (66). Freedman notes the importance to Double Indemnity of the fact that both Neff and Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) are employees of the Pacific All Risk Insurance Company, spending much of the film simply doing their jobs—and doing them well. Racine, on the other hand, is self-employed in his own legal practice, but he spends very little screen time actually working as a lawyer, something at which he is also not very good (and something he professes not to enjoy). Body Heat, for Freedman, removes the interest in work that lies at the center of Double Indemnity, replacing it with an interest in leisure—especially of a sexual nature. After all, Racine’s principal goal in getting involved in Matty’s plot is to have lots of great sex and enough money never to have to work again. Ultimately, Freedman agrees with Jameson that Body Heat is essentially on vacation from history, which Freedman sees as closely congruent with the film’s own “vacation ethos” (69). Thus, while Double Indemnity, clearly set in the late 1930s,“possesses a fine sense of its historical moment,” Body Heat is only vaguely set at the beginning of the 1980s and even introduces intentional anachronisms (71). Moreover, Freedman argues that the disengagement from history in Body Heat, as opposed to Double Indemnity, can be related to the fact that, in 1944, the tide of history was with the United States, which was on the rise as a world power, while 1981 was a time when American power seemed to be in decline, the tide of history having turned against the U.S., with the newly-installed Reagan administration about to make things much worse, giving American culture a good reason to retreat from history, even if unconsciously.
The point, of course, is not that Kasdan was intentionally retreating from history in writing and directing Body Heat. The point is that he and his film were participating in a sweeping cultural phenomenon in which so many neo-noir films (and other cultural artifacts) produced roughly between 1970 and 2000 drew upon the energies of the past, energies that were no longer available in the present. Body Heat thus serves as an excellent example of the way neo-noir films of this period often went beyond the original noir films in various ways, but without asking us to revise our views of original noir, which is treated with a nostalgic form of respect and admiration.
Works Cited
Freedman, Carl. “The End of Work: From Double Indemnity to Body Heat.” Neo-Noir. Edited by Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck, London: Wallflower Press, 2009, pp. 61–73.
Hirsch, Foster. Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir. Limelight Editions, 1999.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1981.
Williams, Linda Ruth. “A Woman Scorned: The Neo-Noir Erotic Thriller as Revenge Drama.” Neo-Noir. Edited by Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck, London: Wallflower Press, 2009, pp. 168–85.
Notes
[1] Racine initially spots Matty as she exits an outdoor concert where an on-stage band is playing Sammy Fain’s “That Old Feeling,” a 1937 hit that has been used in many films since that time. This song is specifically about the experience of nostalgia and thus fits in nicely with this film’s nostalgic look back at Double Indemnity and the original noir cycle.
[2] Freedman interprets Lowenstein’s dancing as a potential sign that he is gay, suggesting a homoerotic element to his friendship with Racine, something that rhymes with the similar element that many critics have seen in the relationship between Neff and Keyes in Double Indemnity. It should be noted, though, that Lowenstein dances somewhat in the style of Fred Astaire, who was at the peak of his stardom in the 1930s, thus linking back to the era in which Double Indemnity is set.