In the midst of a searing Florida heat wave, a woman convinces her lover, a small-town lawyer, to murder her rich husband.
The insensible colonization of the present by the nostalgia mode can be observed in Lawrence Kasdan elegant film Body Heat, a distant "affluent society" remake of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, set in a contemporary Florida small town a few hours' drive from Miami. The word remake is, however, anachronistic to the degree to which our awareness of the preexistence of other versions (previous films of the novel as well as the novel itself) is now a constitutive and essential part of the film's structure: we are now, in other words, in "intertextuality" as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect and as the operator of a new connotation of "pastness" and pseudohistorical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces "real" history.
— Frederic Jameson: Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
