Disclaimer: My intentions for this entry are purely for exploration of this phenomenon. I will likely use naughty humor, but hopefully I won't get too naughty.
I simply don't want to be Flagged as having Inappropriate Material(s) on my blog so that the warning page comes up.
Okay, so we're all adults.
Time we had The Talk, don't you think?
Sex in cinema is a multi-faceted thing. It can be naughty (Monty Python's The Meaning of Life), it can be really naughty (Zack and Miri Make A Porno) or it can be passionate (Cruel Intentions) or meaningful (Anything Else).
With sex comes nudity...or at least implied nudity. And here we find a double standard, as pointed out to me several years ago by a female cousin of mine while we and a few friends were at my place watching "Interview With A Vampire."
"Oh sure, the woman's always naked, but never the guy!" she declared.
And she was right, for the most part. Hollywood is, ahem, "gun shy."
For the most part, at least...
"Porky's" comes to mind. That delightful, rough around the edges naughty high school comedy that showed a room full of teenaged boys stripped down to nothing as they awaited their turn with Cherry Forever.
As a side note, that's one of the funniest scenes in the movie. A further side note, which should be added, herein states that the "Have You Seen This Penis?" conversation is, arguably, the funniest scene in the whole damned series.
I can think of very, very few instances where the lower half of a guy has been displayed.
Of course there's Jason Mewes' two full frontal scenes in "Zack and Miri," but that's also in the name of fun. Plus I secretly suspect Mewes' had been wanting to show off his goods since "Clerks II."
An implied display of such things was recently seen in "Beowulf." What Zemeckis did was meant to be convey a sense of seriousness, but it was kind of silly to me.
Beowulf is going to fight Grendel naked. Sure, I believe that.
Show me one warrior who'll actually strip down and risk having his beloved weapon severed by some grisly means and I'll be the first volunteer to reattach it with super glue and a staple gun.
As Bob Z's camera would swing around to follow the action (at a safe CGI distance not to reveal anything), it would always place itself to where a hand, a sword, or a vessel containing some kind of ale would be conveniently in the way.
Beowulf was reduced to "Austin Powers."
But those opening sequences in "Powers" were hilarious. Beowulf was laughable and wasn't meant to be.
I figure they'd gone to all that trouble to undress Beowulf, they might as well just show it all, at least in the Unrated Editions.
There are so few visual displays of various male's southern regions that I can really only think of what I've mentioned above. But should one ask me about a naked female, and it's not so matter of listing movies I've seen, it's a matter of knowing where to begin.
"American Pie" is most obvious to me, of course, but there's an infinite number of girls who've shed their clothes in various movies, be they serious dramas or about horny teenagers.
While male centered movies show sex as a series of headboard shaking wham-wham-wham up against the bedroom wall, the ladies try something decidedly different. Enter "Twilight."
This is where attempts at overt sex fail, especially if you've read the book.
The book is a sensual collection of lightly placed kisses and states of longing. The movie is the same, but midway through there's a moment where hormones seem to take control while Bella strips her pants halfway off and Edward is on top of Bella....and then nothing happens.
I sat in that theater going "well, that was a waste."
It was anti-climactic, and didn't belong in the movie. In terms of dramatic tension, you cannot go halfway, only to pull back and then have a montage of Edward and Bella laughing and talking after completely failing to have sex.
Yeah, it's a PG-13 movie, and thirteen year old girls really don't need to see Robert Pattinson rolling around naked (or half naked) with the one girl they identify most with. But, outside of that, the dramatic tension is, essentially, a supreme letdown.
Bella and Edward could've still been intimate, and it should've been in the same sensual manner of the book.
But if that happened, the Mormons would've shouted and screamed at how we Hollywood degenerates have nothing but sex on the mind, no matter how sensual it was.
There's another double standard that is very slowly breaking down, and it stems from the previous statements about how Hollywood is "gun shy."
You know, I know it, and Heath Ledger would refer to it as "Brokeback Mountain."
Another side note, because I like it, says that Mel Gibson didn't want Heath to do it because of it's controversial nature, and Heath did it for it. Of course, Mel is...well...an alleged anti-Semite with possible strains of conservative Christianity in him.
I'm convinced Jesus is giving Heath a hug for what he did in that movie.
If Hollywood is gun shy about one guy, then two rolling about in bed is even more forbidden, though I can't really figure out why. You could place two air headed bimbos in bed and entire rolls of film will be dedicated to the scene.
I'm not in the least opposed to air headed bimbos rolling in the hay, I just expect fair play.
Certain sectors that are post products of the Sexual Revolution and the era of Free Love are awfully repressed. And by certain sectors, I mean exclusively and exceptionally arrogant heterosexual males that are scared of one thing: that they might like it.
For me, there are few taboos left, especially after witnessing one particular scene in "Last Tango In Paris" where Marlon Brando requests his female friend...uh...well, she unlocks his back door, and that's all I'll say.
Then there's the film called "The Dreamers," which makes use of cinematic fandom and sexual liberation in certain particular scenes: a pair of siblings (if I remember correctly) like to re-enact old movies and the other has to name that film, or suffer a punishment.
One scene has her enacting an old scene, he cannot recall, so she has her brother kneel down in front of an old picture and masturbate to it.
Did I mention all this is unfolding while another male is watching? Yeah, I left that out intentionally. This third young man keeps a picture of the female in next to his "heart," (penis) which is discovered when she undresses him in the kitchen while her brother watches.
She and the third young man proceed to have sex while he goes about his business.
In independent and foreign films, sex is more overtly displayed.
I once watched a series of short films from France that dealt with the subject matter in very, very unique terms.
There's also the much whispered about movie that was called "The Brown Bunny," which featured a scene between the lead actress actively performing oral sex on the male lead who served as director as well. Some would call this porn, but that is debatable.
I say that because I'm quite familiar with adult films as well. Digital Playground has long since held my attention, but their series "Pirates" and "Pirates II" have captured mainstream attention for being the biggest adult production in history.
I still haven't seen them...yet.
But the fact something like this can be accomplished in the adult realm says something, not about the company or the genre, but about the power of its production: it is being taken seriously, and I even hear that "Pirates II" was screened at an upscale college in Los Angeles one evening.
People may have...uh...came for the sex (no pun intended) and stayed for the movie.
And I'm no stranger to displaying the intimate moments of a character in my own works. No sense shying away from it, although I admit sometimes it's gotten away from me.
In the spring of 2007, after having seen a documentary on the History Channel called "Vampire Secrets Revealed," I determined that there was a great story there as part of it dealt with the part of culture who refers to themselves as vampires, and they participate in the exchange of energy, not blood.
I devised an incredibly seductive young man who had the power to not only topple those with three times his strength, he could break their barriers down with a simple touch of flesh upon flesh and then, if he so chose to do, he'd initiate an intimate relationship with them, and feed upon their sexual and spiritual energies (i.e. the kundalini) during lovemaking.
This character was meant to be bisexual, as having no real preference, but when I introduced the character of a male escort, my lead decided he liked the handsome young man more than anyone else, including the two girls he'd had sex with simultaneously in a previous scene.
The escort was just there for this young man to feed upon, which is what my original intention for the relationship was going to be. Then, damn it, my vampire fell in love with someone that preferred girls, yet shared his body with this young man repeatedly.
Even though it wasn't what I'd expected, it did provide a key dramatic point needed which I hadn't counted on that changed the story considerably and made it better than I'd originally envisioned.
"Twilight" fans will hate it, I'm sure.
And so will Hanso, who also despises "Twilight," but that's okay as well. I write only for myself, not for the world. And I've always managed to gather a following, so I'm not worrying about popularity issues.
Whew.
Damn this has been a long entry. My word processors tells me I'm at Page 5 of 5. That's my clue to wrap it up.
The point here is, basically, we're awfully repressed these days, yet our past was somewhat much more explicit.
You can have nudity, you can have overt sexual behavior, and you can cross into realms that haven't been explored. You can and you should, cinematically speaking, as long as it's necessary for dramatic reasons, or even if it's just for a laugh.
But the key term is "necessary." Throwing in a scene just for the hell of it (outside of comedy) is pointless, and will likely end up on the cutting room floor, or under the heels of the MPAA.
As for me, I see challenges set up in the form of barriers being rebuilt.
Let's break 'em down again because, for me, it's a lot of fun to make people think.
