Tag Archives: feminism

Body Heat (1981)

Body Heat is often compared to Double Indemnity.  In both movies, a man has an affair with a married woman, and they conspire to kill her husband for money.  In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) are the lovers.  They murder her husband, played by Tom Powers, in order to collect on his accident insurance.  By the end of the movie, however, Walter has murdered Phyllis because he suspected she would betray him, and he is on his way to the gas chamber.

In Body Heat, Ned Racine (William Hurt) and Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) are the lovers who murder her husband Edmund (Richard Crenna).  Because she had signed a prenuptial, the only way for her to get any of his money was by inheriting it.  After the murder, Matty betrays Ned, who ends up in prison, while she gets what she has dreamed of since high school, “to be rich and live in an exotic land.”  She has committed the perfect murder.

Of course, Body Heat was made in 1981, whereas Double Indemnity was made in 1944.  Before 1968, when the Production Code was still in force, there was no way someone could get away with murder in a movie.  After the Production Code was abandoned, it became possible to make such a movie, but it almost never happens because we usually don’t like it.  In fact, we so don’t like it that a lot of people deny that there is any such thing as a perfect murder.

In Jigsaw (1962), two detectives are trying to solve a murder.  After being foiled at every turn, one of them says, “It’s beginning to look like the perfect murder to me.”

His superior dismisses the possibility:

There’s no such thing as a perfect murder, my lad.  Somewhere there’s always a flaw.  There’s always a track leading from the kill to the killer, and no matter how well he covers the track, he’s going to leave more tracks doing it.

And yet, murders go unsolved all the time.

Perhaps, in all fairness, we have to distinguish between an unsolved murder and a perfect murder.  Unsolved murders often involve street crime, murders committed by lowlifes, as when a dope fiend kills a drug dealer, and all the police do is send the body to the morgue.  The idea of a perfect murder presupposes that the killer and his victim are at least middle class.

Even when so restricted, there still remain unsolved murders, so perhaps we should make another distinction, in that a murder would not have to be perfect in order for someone to get away with it.  It could have been sloppily done, but the police were busy with other cases and didn’t have the time to thoroughly investigate it.  The perfect murder is supposed to be a matter of wits:  the ingenuity of the killer in setting it up, maybe even faking evidence, as opposed to the cleverness of the detectives in trying to figure out who done it.

Perhaps the mistake lies in trying to apply the concept of the perfect murder to real life, where it does not belong.  Instead, the idea of a perfect murder belongs only in fiction, and even then, only as an ideal toward which the killer strives but never quite realizes, as in movies like Jigsaw, where it turns out not to be perfect, and the killer is caught. Body Heat, however, is a rare exception to this principle.

If we are to enjoy a movie in which someone commits a perfect murder, it is essential that the victim is only getting what he deserves.  In Body Heat, Peter Lowenstein (Ted Danson) is Ned’s friend.  He is also a prosecuting attorney, and he suspects that Ned is involved in Edmund Walker’s murder.  “Walker was a bad guy,” he says, “and the more I find out about him, the happier I am he’s dead. I figure it’s a positive thing for the world….  As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care who killed him, and I don’t care who gets rich because of it.”

That means we don’t have to care either.

Furthermore, there is a scene where Ned is at a restaurant with Edmund and Matty.  When Matty excuses herself to go to the powder room, Edmund says that if he ever found out that she was having an affair with another man, he would kill the guy.  Because he would be willing to kill over a woman, it doesn’t seem so bad that Ned is willing to do the same thing to him.

The second person to be murdered is Mary Ann Simpson.  Actually, she is the real Matty, and Matty is the real Mary Ann.  To avoid confusion, they will be referred to by their assumed names, not their real ones.  Matty assumed Mary Ann’s identity to cover up her unsavory past, and when Mary Ann found out about it, she started blackmailing Matty.  As we have learned from watching movies, blackmailers never accept a single sum of money to keep quiet.  They always come back for more, so the person being blackmailed can put an end to it in only one way.  In other words, the blackmailer brings it on himself.  Furthermore, we always detest blackmailers and want them to come to a bad end, more so even than those that commit murder.  We might accept that Matty gets away with murder and enjoys the rest of her life, but we could not stomach the idea of Mary Ann getting away with blackmail, the movie ending with her living life to the full after having soaked Matty for all she was worth.

Another thing that makes it possible for us to accept the idea of Matty getting away with murder is that we never actually see her kill anyone.  Just as Walter is the one who killed Phyllis’s husband in Double Indemnity, Matty gets Ned to kill Edmund, and we never see her kill Mary Ann, who is already dead when the explosion occurs in the boathouse where her corpse had been placed.

Finally, Matty is a woman.  If a man in a movie murders his wife for money, he absolutely must come to a bad end.  But when a woman does that to her husband, is there not some deep, underlying sympathy for her?  As the song says in Chicago (2002), “He had it coming!”

And this is paradoxical, because when a woman kills her husband, that seems to be the greater evil.  At least, it seems that way to men. In any event, they don’t expect that from a woman.  Men are known for being violent, whereas women seem unsuited for it:  physically, because women are the weaker sex; psychologically, because we think of women as compassionate and nurturing.  That is why Lady Macbeth says, “Unsex me here,” so that she can help her husband commit murder.

Clytemnestra murdered her husband with the help of her lover Aegisthus.  And yet, was she not justified in doing so?  Did not her husband, Agamemnon, murder their daughter Iphigenia as a sacrifice to Artemis? But whereas Clytemnestra is known as the notorious husband-murderer, Agamemnon is not principally known as a daughter-murderer, but for leading the Greeks in a conquest of Troy, gaining glory for himself in doing so.

Perhaps it worth noting that the need for a sacrifice resulted from the fact that Agamemnon had killed a deer in a grove that was supposedly sacred to Artemis.  Calchas, the seer, told Agamemnon that in order to appease Artemis, he must sacrifice Iphigenia.  Now, I think we can all agree that the Greek gods do not exist.  So, this idea on the part of Calchas that Iphigenia must be sacrificed arose out of his own imagination.  In other words, a man decided that a young girl must die.

Calchas could have said to Agamemnon, “Artemis wants you to be sacrificed since you were the one that killed that deer.  She says your brother Menelaus can take over from here and lead the ships to Troy.”

Alternatively, he could have said, “Your son Orestes must be sacrificed.”  But he did not because the idea of sacrificing a female rather than a male was more congenial to all concerned, aside from the girl and her mother, that is.

Finally, the whole story could have been pure fiction, in which case I would be willing to give long odds that it was a man who made it up.

There remains the question, is Body Heat the first work of fiction in which a woman commits the perfect murder?  No, that honor goes to the novel Vanity Fair, in which Becky Sharp is twice referred to as being in the role of Clytemnestra.  She poisons her lover, Jos Sedley, for his life insurance. Most adaptations, be they movies or television series, shy away from that ending, even allowing Becky and Jos to live happily ever after.  The only exception that I am aware of is the 1987 version, in which the murder does take place and Becky gets away with it.

Interestingly, there are repeated allusions in the novel to the murder of Iphigenia, reminding us of how women have readily been sacrificed by men in pursuit of their own selfish ends.

There is a fundamental injustice between the sexes that has been there from the beginning, which men have exploited to their advantage.  And so it is that when a woman finally strikes back against a man, there is a sense of justice being served.  He had it coming!

The Final Phase of Feminism

I didn’t know anything about feminism when I was in high school, back in the early sixties, nor, apparently, did any of the girls I dated.  At least, it never came up in the conversation. Mostly, I was too busy thinking about sex.  Thinking, not doing, because aside from a little kissing and petting, I was unable to achieve my ultimate goal, the Holy Grail of lust and desire. Eventually, I began to think that either it did not really exist, or I was not destined to partake of that mystery. Overhearing my lament one day, one of the guys sitting at my lunch table took pity on me, and decided to give me the benefit of his wisdom. “Listen here, boy,” he said.  “I’m going to tell you about women.  You have to find ’em, feed ’em, fuck ’em, and forget ’em,” he said with the authority that comes from being six feet tall and having broad shoulders.

The last one puzzled me.  “Forget ’em?” I thought to myself. “Why would I want to do that?”  I knew that if I ever managed to go all the way with some girl, I would never forget her.  In fact, I would probably hold on to her for dear life.  But the second one, “feed ’em,” I completely disregarded.  I figured it was there merely for the sake of fourfold alliteration:  he needed four words beginning with “f” to make it sound right.  Years later, I read a column by Miss Manners, where she said that when it came to courtship, many things had changed over the years, but one principle remained inviolate:  the gentleman must take the lady to dinner.  But at the time, I regarded it as completely unnecessary.  “Better to eat before you went out on a date,” I thought. “Then you have more time for sex.”

When I got to college, I was still a virgin.  Though I would never have admitted to anything so disgraceful, yet one of my fraternity brothers could tell that when it came to girls, I was floundering. So, he took me aside and said, “Listen here, boy. I’m going to tell you about women.  When you take them out on a date, you’re going to have to go to a really nice restaurant and slap that money down.”

That was most unwelcome advice, given my impecunious condition.  I had a small allowance from my father, which was enough to take a girl to a drive-in movie, and spring for a couple of Cokes and a bag of popcorn, but this dinner thing was out of the question.  To afford that, I would have to get a part-time job. It was all I could do to take twelve hours a semester in my exacting major of philosophy without adding that to my schedule.  In fact, it was at this point that I first realized that as much as I wanted sex, I dreaded work even more.  So, as with the advice I had received in high school, I once again disregarded the idea that I would have to “feed ’em.”  There had to be another way.

Fortunately, there was.  It was the sexual revolution.  Now, I know some people say that there was just as much sex in the old days, but people just didn’t talk about it.  Well, if that is so, they sure had me fooled.  When I was in high school, just getting to third base, where articles of clothing were actually removed, was something a guy could take pride in; and as for going all the way, that was so rare that when tales of such were told, one had good reason to doubt their veracity.  So, this theory that the only effect of the sexual revolution was conversational is one that does not accord with my experience or the experience of my friends.  In fact, the difference was profound.  When I started college in 1964, every girl I knew was adamant about the importance of being a virgin when she got married.  And my fraternity brothers were in complete agreement on that point:  it was important for a girl to be a virgin when she got married. Four years later, any girl on that campus who was still a virgin was trying to do something about it.  So, in the sexual anarchy of the late sixties, I finally managed to lose my virginity, notwithstanding the fact that I had yet to pony up for a steak dinner.

What saved me was the fact that the girl who took my virginity already had a boyfriend, who was stationed in Vietnam, and so I was just filling in for him while he was out of town.  And that meant that a drive-in movie, a couple of Cokes, and a bag of popcorn were all the expenditure required of me to finally enjoy the ultimate embrace.

In fact, as I later discovered, a paramour operates under different rules from that of a woman’s boyfriend or husband.  Several years after I got out of college and went to work (ugh!), I began a flirtation with a married coworker, and things had advanced to the point where it was time for me to make my move.  A guy that I worked with could see what was going on.  “Are you and Sally fooling around?” he asked.

“Well, I was thinking about asking her out to dinner,” I answered, figuring it was high time that I took the advice given to me twice before.

“You can’t take her to dinner!” he said, alarmed.  “The night has a thousand eyes,” he explained. “I made the mistake once of taking a married woman to dinner, and while she and I were looking at the menu, who should walk in the door but one of her friends and the guy she was dating.  Of course, we invited them to sit down and have dinner with us.  And, of course, I ended up picking up the tab. And not just for the meal, because every time a round of drinks was bought, I bought four.”  Therefore, he concluded, it was neither necessary nor advisable to take a married woman to dinner.  “All you need,” he said, “is a room and a bottle.  And since you are a bachelor living alone in an apartment, you already have a room.  Just find out what she likes to drink.”

Now, I know people who cannot think about socializing except in the context of food and drink. And thus it might be argued that many people simply enjoy this sort of thing for its own sake, and not just as a necessary prelude to sex.  But that does not mean that the man should foot the bill. And this leads me, finally, to the issue of feminism.  The final phase of feminism will be achieved when either it is no longer necessary to “feed ’em” in order for sex to take place, or, if dinner is desired for its own sake, the woman pays for her own meal and drinks.

Over the years, I have debated several women on just this issue. I remember one woman in particular, one of my dancing partners, with whom I had just such a discussion.  She didn’t mind going out Dutch treat, because we weren’t having sex.  I was of the opinion, however, that the one did not necessarily imply the other, and I thought it would be nice if we made our already enjoyable relationship even better.  To this, she took a dim view.  “You make me pay my own way, and now you want a kiss?” she asked, shaking her head at the audacity of my presumption.

I explained to her that by so doing she would achieve the final phase of feminism.  “No woman can count herself a complete feminist,” I averred, “until she goes Dutch treat with a man with whom she is sexually intimate.” We discussed the matter at length, during which time she pointed out that it was against all human nature, or, at least, all female human nature, to behave as I suggested.  She noted that it had been firmly established by sociobiologists that the way to a woman’s heart was through her stomach, that a man must let a woman know that he will provide for her and take care of her in order to gain her favor.  In fact, she went on, this principle even extended back into the animal kingdom, and did not originate with cavemen.

“But the whole point of having a big brain,” I replied, “was to be able to override our bad instincts.  True feminism can hardly be grounded on the mating principles of the Stone Age.”

I could see her squirm.  Finally, she went for the ultimate justification of behavior, beyond which there is no appeal:  “I can’t help it,” she said.  “It’s the way I was raised.”

Boy, had I heard that one before!  But I knew that people could be very selective about parental influence.  “Listen,” I said.  “Were you raised to have premarital sex?”

“Uh … no,” she answered hesitantly.

“And didn’t you tell me you started screwing when you were fifteen?”

“Uh … yes.”

“Well,” I said, as I prepared to deliver the coup de grâce, “the way you were raised didn’t count for much there, did it?”

So, you see, I won that argument.  That is to say, an impartial debate judge would undoubtedly have scored more points in my favor.  Unfortunately, there is another sense in which I lost that debate.

There is no doubt that women have come a long way in the feminist movement.  But I lay it down as an absolute that the final phase of feminism will not be achieved until the “feed ’em” part of the formula has been eliminated once and for all.