Nudes in the News

Perhaps it’s just a prurient interest on our part that has led us to notice, but there seems to be an awful lot of nudity in the news lately. None of it is nearly so significant as all that economics and foreign affairs and the rest of the world’s crises, but it makes for an interesting diversion.

Most of the headlines have been about that anonymous computer hacker who somehow got hold of a large cache of naked pictures of prominent movie actresses and put them out on the internet, but we’ve paid only scant attention. We don’t keep abreast of the contemporary cinema, so to speak, and it’s hard to work up any voyeuristic interest in people we’ve never heard. There’s been quite a bit of feminist outrage generated, what with the invasion of women’s privacy and the objectification of their bodies and all that, but we’re also finding it hard to work up any indignation. So many people have an all-too-natural curiosity about the people who move around in such meticulously objectified bodies that whenever we type the name of almost any movie star into our favorite search engine a window pops up with suggested searches that always include “nude.” It pops up even with the antique movie stars from the black-and-white that we’re most likely to be investigating, and so far as we can tell nude pictures of screen sirens go back all the way to the beginning of motion pictures. Back in our more avid movie-going days in the ’70s almost all the flicks would throw in at least one nude scene, probably on the longstanding Hollywood theory that you have to give the audiences something they couldn’t see on television, but now that you can get bare bodies on the boob tube, so to speak, it’s all computer generated images and shoot-’em-ups, and it doesn’t represent an improvement. We feel a bit badly for the women who had their nude pictures taken with the assurance they would remain private, and worry if anything can remain private these days, but can’t help wondering what they did intend.

Another story at Cosmopolitan, which we assume is a reliable source for this sort information, suggests that posing for naked pictures is a surprisingly popular pastime these days even for people who aren’t movie stars. The famously risqué women’s magazine took a survey of “millennial women” and found that a whopping nine out of 10 had been photographed nude and that only 14 percent regretted it while 82 percent said they would do it again. The survey doesn’t delve into motives, leaving us to speculate why so many young women want their nudity photographed. For the benefit of boyfriends, perhaps, but modern relationships being so fleeting it hard’s to imagine that there wouldn’t be more widespread regrets if that were case. We suspect that the narcissism that is also so common of the younger generation is a more likely explanation.

Oddly enough, this widespread naked photography seems to be breaking out at the same time jurisdictions around the world are banishing public nudity. According to the New York Post even the famously free-minded French Riviera has ceased the topless sunbathing that formerly did so much for France’s tourism industry. Apparently the practice hasn’t been officially banned but merely become passé, in part because of the ubiquity of cell phone cameras and the potential that the bared breasts will turn up on that darned internet. The article lists several other exotic locations that have recently banned public nudity, including Hainan Beach in China, Machu Picchu in Peru, and Barcelona in Spain, all before we even realized there were naked people there. In most cases it’s because the locals have grown weary of naked tourists, who probably aren’t walking around unclothed in their own home towns, and it seems a reasonable request.

Getting far less attention is a minor nudity problem just up the turnpike Topeka. The city had apparently never gotten around to passing a law requiring clothing in public, which is the sort of thing a city really shouldn’t have to pass a law about, and until recently Topekans had always extended this courtesy to one another without legal coercion, but apparently one fellow has recently taken to nude strolls around the town. We’re not sure why, although the weather here in Kansas has been just beautiful lately, and it might well be the economy, or maybe global warming, but in any case he’s forced the city council take up the issue. Even in such a staid town as Topeka, it seems, the modern tendency to bare it all has become sadly literal.

— Bud Norman

Keeping Abreast of the Cinema

Politics and economics and the rest of our usual fare seem far too dreary for such a mild spring day as today, so we might as well take time out to note an interesting development in the field of motion pictures. According to a report in London’s Telegraph, the steamy sex scene has all but disappeared from Hollywood fare.

The Fleet Street dispatch confirmed our own observation of the contemporary cinema. Although our theater-going virtually ceased way back in the four-dollar-ticket days, when we noticed that all the good movies had already been made, the advent of Netflix and other stay-at-home media have allowed us to indulge a purely sociological interest in the latest offerings to an extent that we have lately noticed a distinct lack of gratuitous sex and nudity. Having been regular movie-goers back in the ‘70s, when movie-makers felt obligated to insert a few bare breasts into even the most asexual plot lines, the frequent absence of such scenes is strikingly conspicuous.

More avid movie buffs will no doubt be able to cite numerous exceptions to this trend, and might even know the exact moment on the well-worn video disc to find them, but it’s certainly not like the old days when even such respectable actresses as Julie Andrews were routinely exposing themselves. In today’s cinema the actresses are more likely to be wielding actual bazookas rather than the slang variety, and shoot-outs seem far more common than sex scenes. This strikes the Telegraph’s correspondent as an odd development, given the continued popularity of sex, and it strikes us as doubly odd at a time when Hollywood is self-righteously embracing both the current gun control mania and an anything-goes sexual philosophy.

The Telegraph offers the expected economic explanation, citing the importance of an under-age audience that is theoretically excluded from any motion picture that receives an “R” rating. Although the theory is quite plausible, and backed up by quotes from suddenly censorious movie directors and producers, it overlooks a longer trend in the development of movies.

Since the advent of television, the movie industry has mostly devoted itself to offering something that can’t be found at home. In the ‘50s this meant the kinds of big-budget, wide-screen, Technicolor epics that wouldn’t fit on the tiny black-and-white screens that were then the state of the television art. The moral standards of the time meant the epics were usually of the Biblical or historical variety, and while such directors as Cecil B. DeMille could always find some fairly salacious passages of scripture or risqué episodes of antiquity the actresses always kept their robes on. Color television and mini-series eventually allowed television to compete on these epic terms, but by then the “sexual revolution” had come along to allow movies a degree of explicitness that still wasn’t allowable on the federally-regulated public airwaves. A natural public interest in what a famous movie star looked like naked could only be sated at the theaters, and Hollywood took full advantage. Cable television then negated this advantage, however, and much of its premium-channel fare was devoted to nothing but nudity and simulated sex scenes with all of that extraneous plot and dialogue and character development stuff dispensed with altogether.

Now that the internet provides easy access to an astounding abundance of outright pornography, with something for even the most arcane tastes, Hollywood has retreated back to the big spectacle gimmick. This time around the technology is even more extravagant, with Imax theaters that dwarf the old curtained Cinemascope screens and computer-generated special effects and seat-shaking sound systems that make Moses’ parting of the Red Sea seem a cheap parlor trick, with all of that extraneous plot and dialogue and character development stuff dispensed with altogether. It doesn’t make for very compelling viewing to anyone but that coveted under-age audience, but it doesn’t require a lot of complicated translating for the foreign markets and thus far it can’t be found at home.

Demur as we are about matters of sexuality, being of a conservative temperament both politically and culturally, we regard this latest development with some regret. “The Last Detail,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “A Clockwork Orange,” and numerous other films of the ‘60s and ‘70s took full advantage of the era’s license to make meaningful statements that were made worthy by their frank depictions of a licentious time. On the other hand, the Hays Code era of strict restrains produced an even more impressive body of work, and such ingenious filmmakers as Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges and numerous others took full advantage of the hated studio system to create meaningful statements that were made worthy by their sly innuendo and elegant subtlety.

That Golden Age of Hollywood isn’t coming back, though, and the current circumspection of the cinema doesn’t signal a return to traditional sexual standards but rather an admission that they are gone with internet wind, so it’s sad to see that the movie-going public apparently prefers special effects to good old-fashioned sex. We never really minded all those breasts, to be quite honest in a ‘70s sort of way, and we always found them preferable to seeing some guy’s brain get blown all over the extra-wide screen Better to have a well-told story of interesting and believable people, maybe even a profound shoot-‘em-up such as “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” or “The Professionals,” but apparently the kids aren’t interested.

— Bud Norman