Sex always sells, but how often does it tell?

I've mentioned before Jim Emerson's sometimes devastating disembowelments of film. These occur mostly in his Scanners blog, but this week he also has an "open letter to Hollywood" in MSN movies. This is a good example of what I'm talking about.

One of Emerson's suggestions to fix what ails Hollywood is that they adapt an attitude towards sex and nudity onscreen that is closer to the films of the '70s and directors who started then. He says:

Do you know people who pop out of bed after sex sporting underwear? Who's in such a blasted hurry to get dressed?

The best special effect in the history of movies is the human face, with the human body coming in a close second. Use it.

I have, I hope not a double standard about nudity in film, but I am of more than one mind about it. As a heterosexual male, I am pleased to see attractive women nude onscreen.

I'm also equal-minded enough to think those who would be pleased to see attractive men nude there should get their reward as well.

But, I've always remembered something I once read; I wish I could remember who said it. It was to the effect that whenever an actress (or, much less frequently, an actor) shows nudity on film, it instantly changes the genre of the movie. It may have been a comedy or an action film or whatever, now it is a documentary.

Eyes Wide Shut, to pick one example, becomes "This is what Nicole Kidman (and a whole lot of other, less-famous women) looks like when she takes her dress off."



I think there's something to that. There are always exceptions, of course. But more-or-less off the top of my head, I can think of less than a handful.

By exceptions, I mean films that use nudity and/or sex to really tell us something about the characters or advance the story. Which films those are is, admittedly, often or always a matter of opinion.

I think Monster's Ball is a good example.



There's just no way to tell that story without the sex scene, and we do need to see it, because it's about more than "seeing Halle Berry's o face."

In this scene, the way the two characters have sex tells us something about them-and it also gets each of them to new places in their lives. (There actually is a reason why Berry won the Oscar that year.)

More than 95 times out of 100, though, if an actor doesn't want to show all or any of his or her body, I think most stories can be told without them.

But one of my pet peeves, and Emerson touches on this, is when actors behave in ways onscreen in which no human being would behave. Unless they were trying to prevent their nude bodies from being seen by a camera.

A good example of this is Lisa Cholodenko's Laurel Canyon. Near the beginning of this film, Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale are having sex.



When they finish, Beckinsale is seen lying back in bed, her breasts covered by a shirt. (Ladies, how many of us guys leave your shirts on?) Her pants are off, but one of her legs is raised just enough to obscure any glimpse of her pussy from the camera.

What I object to is not that I was denied a gimpse of Beckinsale's tits or a look between her legs. What she has can't be that much more mysterious than any other woman.

But Cholodenko, by shooting the scene that way (or Beckinsale, by choosing to limit how much she would show), shook me right out of the movie.

Looking at Beckinsale strike this very awkward, hard-to-hold and uncomfortable-looking position, I wasn't thinking about the characters, or even watching a documentary called "This Is What Kate Beckinsale's Naked Body Looks Like."

I was thinking "Wow. Somebody really, really didn't want to show her body." Well if that's the case, then find a likely reason to cover it up (in context, this character even had one).

The answer isn't "more nudity," it's "a grown-up attitude about necessary nudity." (Excluding exploitation films, and others that have no pretensions of anything but quick-and-easy entertainment. If you want to entertain a mostly male, mostly young audience, there's still no quicker and easier way than breasts.)

If a scene that needs to be in a story features a character or characters that, if no one were filming them, would naturally be naked, they should be naked.

This doesn't mean their nudity has to be seen on camera, btw-but we the audience should know they're naked.

And if the scene isn't necessary either for plot or character (which for some of us is the same thing, but that's another post), it should have been cut already.