Body Heat: The Trap You Set for Yourself

If, in classic film noir, the femme fatale embodies the male characters’ fears of impotent obsolescence in the post–World War II economy, Matty gives shape to Ned’s growing panic that he may not be man enough to go the distance in Reagan’s America, her escalating sexual voracity only underlining a deeper hunger, not just for money but for all the money—and for the future too.

Matty gives Ned the initial sense that he’s unlocked something in her, telling him, “I’ve never been this way. I can’t remember how I lived before.” From the beginning of their relationship, however, recalling Ned’s lover in the opening scene, she suggests he may not be up to the task. “Hey, gimme a break here,” he says as she reaches for him in a postcoital moment. “It takes a little while.” It’s a teasing exchange, playful. But when, a few scenes later, he tells her, “You’re killing me,” his tone is graver. Ned’s plaint is echoed on the night of the murder when Matty tries to prolong a strategic sexual encounter with her husband. “You trying to kill me?” Edmund asks with a rueful laugh. In the end, both men are right.

In one of the movie’s pivotal scenes, Ned runs into Matty and Edmund at a local restaurant, marking a chilling collision between fantasy and cold reality. “He’s small and mean,” Matty has told Ned. “And weak.” But, confronted with Edmund in real life, Ned finds him neither small nor especially mean, and definitely not weak. Instead, he looks powerful. When Matty excuses herself to visit the restroom, Edmund confides that he met Matty through her ex, a “dorkus” who didn’t know the score: “You’ve got to know the bottom line. That’s all that counts. He didn’t have the goods, this guy. He was like a lot of guys you run into—they want to get rich, they want to do it quick, they want to be there with one score.” That description, as Ned charmingly admits, could easily be applied to himself. Both men laugh, but Edmund is deadly serious. As if he were an early spokesperson for the eighties ethos, Edmund says one must be “willing to do what’s necessary,” his voice tightening as he adds, “whatever’s necessary.” Just as Matty’s supposed insatiability manipulates Ned into proving his manhood, Edmund’s diminishment of men who don’t “have the goods” motivates Ned to prove that he does have them. Listening to Edmund, Ned seems momentarily lost in thought, in anxious calculation. In Shakespearean terms, he’s screwing his courage to the sticking place.

But of course, the only person in Body Heat’s mercenary world who truly has the goods is Matty. At first, she performs for the libidinous Ned the part of aloof object of desire, a classic femme fatale in tight skirts and silk blouses. Then, once Ned is hooked, she transforms herself into a lovestruck girl in shorts and barrettes. With Edmund at dinner, she’s in another kind of drag: pearls, a near-Victorian updo with an extreme side part, a very feminine dress. Later, we’ll see the same prim hairstyle when Ned finds the yearbook photo of a young Matty smiling back at him. He never knew her at all. She became whatever it took to move him forward. Late in the movie, Ned tells his police-detective friend that he believes Matty had set him up from the start. “That was her special gift. She was relentless,” he says, echoing Edmund’s words. “Matty was the kind of person who could do what was necessary. Whatever was necessary.”

Matty’s greatest gift, however, is knowing her mark. Early in their affair, she gives Ned an old-school fedora, with all its connotations of hard-boiled virility. “I’ll bet I guessed the size right,” she says coquettishly, watching him try it on. But even after she tells him she loves it, he seems unsure. “I want to see,” he says, looking into the side-view mirror of his Stingray. Still, he can’t be certain. Even when she rolls up the passenger-side window so that he can get a better view, he doesn’t seem to like what he sees. Back in his office, he ponders the fedora, as if asking himself if he’s man enough for it. Or for Matty. When he tries to hurl it to the hat rack, even he catches the symbolism when it falls to the floor. He never wears it again.

Throughout the film, Ned gazes into his own reflection—literally or figuratively. Moments after killing Edmund in the ramshackle Breakers, he’s startled by a figure in a broken mirror: a homeless man in a baseball cap, squatting in the debris. Ned stares at him and then back at the mirror, as if seeing a premonition of what’s to come. And, in one of the film’s oddest moments, Ned spots a clown in full costume and makeup behind the wheel of a passing car, and watches with a mix of surprise and confusion, and perhaps a flash of self-recognition. Ned does a similar double take when, moments after meeting Matty, he clocks a young hustler cruising him in the men’s-room mirror. In another scene, after visiting an incarcerated client, Ned hears a jail door clank behind him. Indeed, Ned is a low-rent hustler, a clown, a bum, a patsy headed for the electric chair. And Matty knows it from the start, from before they even met. Eventually, we learn that she handpicked Ned after hearing about a case he bungled. In their first encounter, she even tells him, in one of the movie’s most iconic lines: “You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” And she begins to play with him like the marionette he is. Forever searching for a quick score, he’s fated to be the sap—a fate of his own making. As Raymond Chandler famously wrote, “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”

But, in the movie’s final moments, Kasdan hints that Matty, too, might be entrapped by such a fate. Safely ensconced in her luxurious new life, she appears to have fulfilled her yearbook ambition: “To be rich and live in an exotic land.” As she lounges on a tropical beach, the camera moves around her, closing tight on her face. Her expression is enigmatic, shifting. She wipes away not a tear but a bead of sweat. The man next to her says, “It is hot.” And Matty replies, her voice weary, unsettled, “Yes.” The film closes on her ambivalent expression, which suggests not triumph but something else: dissatisfaction. Putting on her sunglasses, she turns to directly face the sun. The fever is still in her. She will never be sated.