The Viewer and the Viewed: Sex and Desire in Body Double
The Viewer and the Viewed: Sex and Desire in Body Double
Hannah Banks - The Pantograph Punch
23.03.2018
![Julia Croft rehearses Body Double](https://silo.imgix.net/Silo_BodyDoubleRehearsal_1504_DSG6239.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&px=4000&q=60&w=1100)
![Julia Croft & Karin McCracken rehearse Body Double](https://silo.imgix.net/Silo_BodyDoubleRehearsal_1534DS8_1038.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&px=4000&q=60&w=1100)
![Karin McCracken rehearses Body Double.](https://silo.imgix.net/Silo_BodyDoubleRehearsal_1523DS8_0974.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&px=4000&q=60&w=1100)
As a naive eight year old, I thought Rose and Jack in Titanic were the greatest love story of all time. I would dance around the lounge singing to Céline Dion, truly believing in ‘The Power of Love’ and I desperately wanted to be the ingénue Christine in The Phantom of the Opera (even though I suspected it would be so much more fun playing the Phantom). I grew up on a diet of Disney and Broadway musicals, always trying to insert myself into the expectations of my gender. Yet once I reached high school, I realised that the reality was much messier, more confusing, and life was nothing like 10 Things I Hate About You.
So many of the narratives we are fed through cinema, television, music and canonical literature rely on entrenched gender roles. They present women as passive: their desire isn’t important; they are secondary characters; the plot happens to them. In Body Double, creators Eleanor Bishop, Julia Croft and Karin McCracken seek to offer a counter-narrative, an alternative script to that which we’ve consumed our whole lives.
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