Lack of nudity in films

blue note

Does the effort made to avoid frightening / shocking / offending / whatevering the audience by showing a female nipple (or worse!) irritate anyone else? We cry for believability in everything in films and complain when we dont get it. But when an actor walks around a house in a bedsheet we say fine. Or when a scene is shot from boarderline awkward camera angles for fear that we'd see the person naked we accept it.

I understand that it's about ratings and what an actor is willing to do, but could we not get over this? The jokes about sex on daytime TV are far more corrupting than showing someone naked in a situation where they would be naked. And we accept fairly gratuitous violence with 12s ratings, but topless nudity means a 15s rating and full nudity means an 18s. This just seems crazy to me.

Anyone else agree or am I just a pervert?

Sad Professor

I honestly don't think modern films lack nudity, especially of the female kind. There’s loads of it. And the ratings have softened considerably. Even 12 rated films allow it provided it’s not sexual. There’s even more of it on television, most of it gratuitous. But as the furore over Lena Dunham stripping off in Girls shows, people are only okay with nudity as long as it’s of a body they find attractive.

Essien

If an imbalance existed, surely The Wolf of Wall Street alone has corrected it?

It is funny how the nudity in films has to be explained nowadays- I remember when Trance was released and there was a full-frontal scene of Rosario Dawson, which realistically was blink and you miss it, and there were articles online saying why she did it.

If you want to see nudity in anything, watch modern TV shows. It seems to be everywhere now. Banshee, House of Lies, Justified to an extent, and probably loads of others that I cannot think of right now. I'm by now way a prude, but it gets to a point where it's a breath of fresh air when a show doesn't feel it has to do this.

Mickeroo

HBO are the worst for it, they just throw gratuitous sex scenes into every show. Fair enough GoT is like that in the books anyway but I don't really think the likes of Boardwalk Empire would lose any of it's quality if most of the actresses stopped getting naked. It's not quite as annoying as the way they seem to think killing off well liked characters automatically makes a show better somehow, but that's another discussion entirely.

Sad Professor

New cable TV shows are usually keen to prove their adult credentials and I guess nudity is the easiest way of doing so. You even see in some films. There’s a totally pointless shower scene involving a body double in Miami Vice. Mann seemed overly eager to earn his R-rating in way he never was previously.

johnny_ultimate

There's a rather fine line between naturalistic and gratuitous - just look at the divisive reactions that have greeted Blue is the Warmest Colour and Wolf of Wall Street's sexual content, different viewers offering radically different perspectives on whether it constitutes gratuitous sex or not. And yeah many modern shows feature nudity to a ridiculous degree, seemingly as a badge of honour. At least stuff like Girls or Masters of Sex actually have more artistic and thematic justifications for it, although in both cases you often see even encouraging critics and fans suggesting they tone it down and just get on with the rest of the stuff.

Yeah, L-shaped sheets can often seem an awkward manner of avoiding nudity, as can unnatural camera angles. But if the story, characters or themes don't require nudity then it's probably easier just to avoid the various potential complications - both actors, commercial and social reasons - that come with the territory. It only IMO becomes a major issue when it feels like the overall vision has been compromised. I don't think we lose anything with an L-shaped sheet in a mainstream rom-com, but if it's a more intimate work then compromises are more, well, compromising.

I do think the double standards when it comes to male and female nudity are troublesome, though, although sadly indicative of many wider social issues.

Player 2

Dennis, is that you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuaZaQnYYHs

e_e

I take it the OP hasn't seen The Wolf of Wall Street, Blue Is the Warmest Colour, 12 Years a Slave or the upcoming Stranger By the Lake and Nymphomaniac.

jaykhunter

Yeah I'd agree with the OP. I assume it's a grab for a lower film certificate. It depends on the film or TV show, but I absolutely detest when people are shown just after having sex, but they are still wearing clothes. Especially a bra, I hear it's super-comfortable. Or women who suddenly become very modest, holding the sheet up to cover her breasts.

syklops

blue note wrote: »

Does the effort made to avoid frightening / shocking / offending / whatevering the audience by showing a female nipple (or worse!) irritate anyone else? We cry for believability in everything in films and complain when we dont get it. But when an actor walks around a house in a bedsheet we say fine. Or when a scene is shot from boarderline awkward camera angles for fear that we'd see the person naked we accept it.

I understand that it's about ratings and what an actor is willing to do, but could we not get over this? The jokes about sex on daytime TV are far more corrupting than showing someone naked in a situation where they would be naked. And we accept fairly gratuitous violence with 12s ratings, but topless nudity means a 15s rating and full nudity means an 18s. This just seems crazy to me.

Anyone else agree or am I just a pervert?

Not a movie, but I remember an episode of Dexter in the worst season yet(the last one), where Dexter is imagining parts of his girlfriends body, without imagining any of the good parts. He imagines her midriff, her thighs and part of her shoulder. Considering its a series about a serial killer and they have shown female nudity in the past, that moment was just daft.

But I agree. The female walking around her apartment wrapped in a sheet after just having sex with the guy who is in bed with her, is really a bit silly. The plot has shown they slept together, so why it it ok to show they slept together but its not ok to show some skin?

Da Shins Kelly

As far as I can see, there's absolutely no lack of naked women in film and television anyway. Men, not so much, but so much of entertainment is geared toward 'the gaze' anyway, so it's not really surprising.

blue note

I should have said that I also think there's too much at times. i.e. Halle Berry in swordfish.

It just annoys me that it can be so taboo. And that they must waste some budget on reshoots and adding steam to a scene to avoid embarrassment.

MagicMarker

If anything there's too much of it, especially with regards to women, women more often than not seem to be nothing more than decoration in a lot of crap that's spewed out in recent years.

I put on the first episode of Hemlock Grove and there's a completely pointless sex scene within the first minute. Immediately I'm like 'ffs'. If that's the best you can do to for me within a minute then I'm not interested, and switched off.

Howard Juneau

blue note wrote: »

I should have said that I also think there's too much at times. i.e. Halle Berry in swordfish.

It just annoys me that it can be so taboo. And that they must waste some budget on reshoots and adding steam to a scene to avoid embarrassment.

Halle Berry was topless, it lasted a few seconds. It's not like she was in Showgirls or anything

A lot of people are under the misconception that excessive gratuitous sex and violence are what makes something adult in nature. The belief seems to stem from basic cables relish in recent years in trying to see how far they can push it. You see it all the time when people discuss television and will write a show off simply because the cast members keep their clothes on. A recent discussion on the BBC's The Musketeers had people hoping that the 9pm time slot meant that it was adult in nature and as such the ladies would get neekid at the drop of a hat.

It's a ridico9lous and juvenile mindset to have. Often the most adult of shows and films have neither nudity of violence. It is not about how much flesh you bare or tear but rather the themes and issues in play. Unnecessary nudity can be incredibly distracting and Game of Thrones seems to indulge in it at every opportunity. I know that the books are full of it but a little restraint on the shows part would actually benefit the overall show. Shows such as Banshee and Spartacus went completely overboard with excessive sex and violence and as such people wrote them off as mere titillation but as the shows progressed they managed to evolve into adult shows which examined complex issues and themes.

Cinema seems to view nudity as something to be used so as to gain an R rating and with it appear to be adult. Few films in recent years have used nudity in a natural and humane manner with Flight being one of the few where it felt believable and necessary to the scene.

Goldstein

Deleted User wrote: »

... with Flight being one of the few where it felt believable and necessary to the scene.

I was just thinking of that opening which many found to be gratuitous. Personally I think if she hadn't have been naked walking around the room after just having sex then THAT would have been ridiculous. General audiences have become so accustomed to censorship in sex scenes and their aftermaths that often (as is the case here) censorship's absense was seen as the anomalous event rather than its presense.

Carrying on the point that Johnny made earlier you could question why Denzel wasn't wandering around in the nip aswell as Nadine Velazquez. Double standards in that regard will be here for a long time yet...not that I'm complaining though to be fair Oz has single-handedly corrected any penis-shot deficiency on the small screen at least. #OMGMyEyes!

I cant think of an instance of full-frontal male nudity in movies of recent years that hasn't been done solely for comic relief. I'm thinking of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Walk Hard.

Amirani

Deleted User wrote: »

I cant think of an instance of full-frontal male nudity in movies of recent years that hasn't been done solely for comic relief. I'm thinking of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Walk Hard.

Michael Fassbender in Shame.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

there was ... jesus i honestly cant think of his name, himself in antichrist

and viggo mortensen in eastern promise, although it wasn't so much full frontal as "oh, look there it is"


--edit

willem dafoe!

maybe i blanked on it because his name sounds like willy

Deleted User

Deleted User wrote: »

I cant think of an instance of full-frontal male nudity in movies of recent years that hasn't been done solely for comic relief. I'm thinking of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Walk Hard.

We had Watchmen, Bronson, Shame, 28 Days Later, 9 Songs, Eastern Promises and there's been a few others.