It’s a subjective experience - you have something important on your mind and you interpret some random sight in terms of that thing. You probably have had the experience of seeing something that appears to be an omen. We sense that he notices the clown because he already suspects, subconsciously, that he is being played for a fool. But the scene subtly shifts into Ned’s perspective, and the camera becomes Ned’s eyes, following the clown as he passes. If the clown simply passed in the background of the frame, it would have been an obvious symbol that Ned is a fool. As he stands on a street corner, a convertible approaches, driven by a clown. With memories of both the Florida and New York bar exams still fresh in my mind, this was a harrowing thought.Īs part of the murder plot, Ned travels to South Florida to establish an alibi. She targets him because his sloppy lawyering once landed him in a serious malpractice suit involving the bane of all law students: the Rule Against Perpetuities. She doesn’t settle on him because he’s horny or because he’s barely scraping by in his backwater law practice. Ultimately, the framing of Ned Racine is less surprising than the reason Matty Walker picked him as her mark. Can Ned trust her? Should he trust her? You suspect not, but you cannot say why other than the fact that these types of affairs, and the murder plots they spawn, never turn out well. You see Ned embark on an affair with the married Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner), who stands to inherit a fortune if her husband had the common decency to die.
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And when Ned described his law practice as allowing him to send his shirts out and eat in a nice restaurant once a month if he didn’t order an appetizer, I remembered several classmates who struggled to build law practices in the sawgrass and palmetto.īut the movie did more than just conjure up memories.
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When Peter Lowenstein (Ted Danson) lifted his customary two glasses of iced tea off the coffee shop counter, I could taste that chilled sweetness at the back of my throat. I was a runner in law school, and when Ned Racine (William Hurt) jogged on the docks I could feel the searing heat of the Florida sun through his sweat-heavy FSU tee shirt. My Florida memories had faded among life decisions, career concerns, and sputtering attempts at writing fiction. When Body Heat was released in 1981, I was three years back in New York and working as an editor for a legal publishing company. There were blackwater rivers, live oaks hung with Spanish moss, and sluggish ponds where gators lazed with only their eyes breaking the surface. North Central Florida was rough and rural, but charmingly so for someone with northern sensibilities.
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I graduated from the University of Florida law school at the end of 1977 and stayed in Gainesville for almost another year, trying to figure out what to do – a process I’ve since learned may pause but never quite ends. This is the first in our member-written series: My Favorite Crime Movie.