It’s a tale of two movies — and a stark example of the film industry’s complicated, contradictory attitudes toward male nudity.
In “Any Given Sunday,” Oliver Stone’s contemplation of the kaleidoscopic collisions of football, Cameron Diaz, playing the young owner of the Miami Sharks, tours the locker room after a victory. The camera follows the blond star as she stops to congratulate one player, who stands naked and larger than life in every way. He is just one of a number of men shown that way.
The scene is simultaneously a realistic view and an ostentatious flouting of a longtime Hollywood taboo against full frontal male nudity in mainstream movies. Yet it received an R rating, which means minors can attend with an older person, rather than the more restrictive NC-17, a commercial kiss of death because it bans anyone under 17 from the audience.
Now recall the controversy over “Color of Night,” in mid-1994, when the Motion Picture Association of America objected mightily to shots of a naked Bruce Willis, front and center. To win an R rating back then, director Richard Rush was forced to excise a six-minute segment, consigning the offending organ to the very briefest of cameos.
So does this mean that our standards for what is acceptable on screen have changed? Film and cultural critics offer widely varying views. Some believe cinema’s traditional taboo against showing male genitals remains strongly in place, while others declare frontal nudity increasingly common.
Strangely, both are right.
Time was, only a few American actors had bared it all for art, even early in their careers. There was, say, Robert De Niro in “1900” (1976) and Richard Gere in “American Gigolo” (1980).
But the episodes were so infrequent that their very occurrence made them memorable (particularly after the rightward lurch of the 1980s). Indeed, 20 years later, the novelty of Gere’s nude scene is about all that endures from “American Gigolo.”
In the 1990s, however, a new frankness seemed to slip into film. John Malkovich went nude in “The Sheltering Sky” (1990), as did Tom Berenger in “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” (1991). Harvey Keitel, always the independent, had frontal nude scenes in “Bad Lieutenant” (1992) and “The Piano” (1993).
Then there was “The Crying Game,” whose entire plot turned on the unexpected display of the male member, thereby shocking the protagonist into realizing that the “woman” he had fallen for was different than she seemed.
Similarly, in “Boogie Nights” (1997), a goofy, sentimentalized view of the porn era of the mid-’70s to mid-’80s, a filmful of chatter about the main character’s remarkable endowment is realized visually in the last scene, when Mark Wahlberg’s character finally reveals the gargantuan (prosthetic) organ that has made him a natural in the adult-entertainment industry.
Why the change? In no small part, film images mirror a general easing of cultural strictures. Some of that was unavoidable, as people as diverse as John and Lorena Bobbitt and Bill Clinton made headlines.
On TV, hip new shows determined to push the envelope of propriety brought a nightclub standard of comedic candor to prime time.
Credit — or blame — foreign films for some of the change, says Peter Lehman, a professor of film studies at Arizona State University and author of “Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body.”
“One of the places you are finding an increase in full frontal male nudity is in what are usually called international art films,” says Lehman, who notes that “The Piano,” “The Crying Game” and “The Pillow Book” all fall into that category, as do “The Sheltering Sky” and “Sirens,” the 1994 film that featured a naked Sam Neill.
But there’s clearly a different sensibility at work in Hollywood as well. Gregory Black, a professor of communication studies at the University of Missouri and author of two books about film and censorship, says Hollywood executives have long assumed that “men are a lot more embarrassed to be sitting in an audience and seeing male nudity than women are to be sitting in an audience and seeing female nudity.”
Now, studios are belatedly coming to weigh the demands of gender parity when it’s time to disrobe. Topless scenes, after all, have long been almost a rite of passage for female actresses. It’s equally instructive that one reputed measure of an actress’ having achieved star status is her ability to insist on a no-nudity clause in her contracts.
“From the female point of view, it is about time,” declares Bobbi Frank, director of operations for Women In Film, an organization of women in the entertainment industry. “If nudity is warranted, then why not the male body as well as the female body?”
Where some see progress for the philosophical notion of equality before the camera, others detect crasser commercial interests at play: specifically, a recognition of the purchasing power of the female audience.
“I think there has been a recognition . . . of men as objects of desire for . . . females, who have as much a right to sexual desire and fantasy as the men in the audience,” says Vivian Sobchack, a professor of film and television at UCLA. “So I think it is ultimately a consumer and box office thing that has been recognized in terms of dollars and demographics.”
Still, differences continue in the treatment of female and male nudity. Lehman says that when the penis does appear, it’s often in a scene designed to shock or dismay. Thus the moment of transvestitic discovery in “The Crying Game,” the revelation of incest in “Angels and Insects,” or the sheer size surprise of “Boogie Nights.”
“It is still a moment of shockingly great significance when they show the penis,” Lehman says. “They can’t just show it in a casual manner, and that is still quite different from the manner in which the female body is commonly shown.”
That’s one reason why “Any Given Sunday” just may mark a departure.
In trying to portray football in its totality, from smash-mouth combat on the line to pain and panic in the backfield, Stone casts an equally candid camera on the locker room. No neatly tucked towels here, but neither an extraordinary moment. These are just football players as they are on any given Sunday, men unself-consciously on display showering and dressing.
But in his insistence on that view — and in his placing Diaz amid that male nudity — Stone calls attention to the very convention he flouts. He is underlining and insisting on the realism of his scene.
The brief nudity in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” when the camera refuses to pan away as Jude Law emerges from the bathtub can also be counted as a move away from exceptionalism and toward casual candor.
