dasfoo
28d ago
Was this actually normal?
Yeah. A lot of the big actresses of the 1970s did nude scenes. Julie Christie, Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, you name it. But these weren't necessarily small indie movies -- the studios were making these movies. "Naturalism" was part of the New Hollywood ethos and the new cultural frankness about sex.
Maybe there was some sense during the late 1980s that nudity had become a mark of low-class, but in the 1990s it came back and there was growing talk about how actresses could be taken more seriously by doing nude scenes, and I think Gwyneth Paltrow's nudity-inclusive Best Actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love was used as a common example. It's hard to think of examples of big actresses from the past 20-30 years who have been shy on camera: Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Connelley, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry all had prominent nude scenes in or adjacent to Oscar-winning roles. Emma Stone just won an Oscar for a role involving explicit nudity, so it's not like it's ever fully gone away, there's just been a vocal movement against it.
dasfoo
28d ago
And that means also that that actress’ friends, family members, dentist, accountant, second-grade teachers, and everyone else can see it. And jerk off to it.
IIRC, David Lynch digitally altered a nude scene in Mulholland Drive for its home video incarnation specifically to lessen the online sharability of screen grabs.
dasfoo
29d ago
As far as Marvel goes, it's a potentially relevant side conversation that so much pop culture that is ostensibly aimed at younger kids -- superheroes, cartoons, YA fiction -- has become mainstream entertainment for adults. It's not just a de-sexing of society that is reflected in that kind of material, but a de-thinking or a de-maturing, which has troubled me. There should, IMO, be a transition in one's teen years from reading YA lit to A lit, because the ideas will be more complex and the conflicts more reflective of the choices and moral considerations that adults face in their lives. They can teach us how to think about complex subjects. I was reading a Reddit thread about Poor Things yesterday, and it's shocking how many people are so media-illiterate that they can't delineate between text and subtext. I partially blame the glut of YA media that has no subtext.
When I was 15/16, as an avid movie-watcher, I was expanding from Star Wars and Superman to stuff like The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Akira Kurosawa. I can't imagine how stunted I would be now if I stuck to content that was created with a juvenile audience in mind. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of junk, but I try to keep it balanced. Even though the dumb horror movies I love push some easy pleasure buttons, they aren't what elevates me.
dasfoo
29d ago
There actually was a tame (prelude to) sex scene in Marvel's The Eternals. It was a little controversial, but less so than the married gay couple later in the movie. It's the exception that proves the rule, however. I think there were also post-sex scenes in both Iron Man and the first Guardians movie, but the culture pretty quickly moved away from scenes in which PG-13 heroes are seen with the most human of character flaws.
It's arguable that we're now entering the backlash period to this recent chasteness. Oppenheimer famously involves a gratuitous sex/nude scene, which doesn't seem to have hurt its critical or popular standing. Poor Things is balls-out sex and nudity. In the last two months, we've had new theatrical releases of the cunnilingus-and-dildo-filled Drive Away Dolls and now Love Lies Bleeding. As those last three suggest, it's likely that there's more appetite in Hollywood right now for sex content that de-emphasizes straight male sexuality -- a subject of criticism in Poor Things -- or that specifically focuses on queer eroticism, as those two new releases do.
Then again, we have the buoyant rise of Sidney Sweeney and the huge success of Anyone But You, which looks like a standard cis sex-com with old-fashioned eye candy for guys and girls. So there's an appetite for that kind of material; it's just whether or not Hollywood has the stomach to look past the scolds on Bluesky or whatever. Maybe the changes Musk has made to Twitter has scattered that kind of hive-mind prudishiness that started some of these movements?
Covid was exactly the opposite, stoking fear rather than cooperation: "Isolate yourself. Other people will kill you by existing."
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