Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies

A documentary taking on the task of nudity in movies is already a precarious idea. It’s easy to come off too prurient and focused on “ooh, boobies!” or too puritanical and condemning all the flesh on display. This is aside from the fact that there is a lot of topics one could explore besides the nudity in and of itself; the pressure to do nude scenes early in an actor’s career, any potential stigma in doing nude scenes, whether nudity on one kind of movie is better or worse than another, actors who go nude to break a previous stereotyped image (for instance, ex-Disney actress doing nudity to shed the “good girl” image), the afterlife of nudity in the internet age where everything is documented in perpetuity, the hypocrisy of the MPAA’s standards, why male nudity is almost always limited to buttocks when women are called upon to do everything short of a Pap smear on camera. Almost none of this is explored. Instead, we get an exploration of cinema from the 1900’s to today. Pre-MPAA, it’s actually somewhat fascinating, as there is a lot of talk of the early days of film and how nudity was used pre-Hayes Code. The idea that these legends of old Hollywood like Clara Bow and Hedy Lamarr did nudity is shocking, but also fascinating from a historical sense. One tends to think of Hollywood then as buttoned up, moralistic, only capable of the most roundabout forms of sexuality. From there, the Hayes Code is implemented, and we see how some filmmakers rebelled, and pushed the limits of what was acceptable. Even throughout the early days of the MPAA, and the quickly eroded validity of the X rating, the movie is, if nothing else, educational in a version of Hollywood many of us did not experience. It is when we get to modern times (70’s and onward) that the documentary changes form. With the MPAA in place — including a laughable scene where a representative swears their ratings are never “value judgements” — the movie is just a parade of clips and “remember this?” moments. Phoebe Cates in “Fast Times”, Betsy Russell in “Private School”, all the nudity in “Caligula”, slasher movies, the 90’s erotic thriller boom, women in prison movies ... it’s just a parade of nude clips, with talking head commentary from some of the participants and some other people, mostly going “wow, this movie sure had tits” or “sure did see a guy’s dick in this one”. It feels childish and leering to catalog and show so many of these nude scenes that, while memorable, certainly aren’t some kind of watershed moment. I just watched the damned thing, and though they show the actress who gets nude in “The Last American Virgin” a half dozen times, I can’t remember her name, and the movie is hardly memorable to begin with. Yes, “Showgirls” has a ton of nudity. AND? Why are we seeing it here? As I said, there’s a far deeper set of topics one could bring up when discussing nudity in film. What little is touched on is done so fleetingly. Everything else is just “did you know this movie had nudity in it? Here it is!”. I’ll give credit that it isn’t JUST about women; there is plenty of discussion about male nudity as well, so it is an equal playing field here. But at the end, once you get past Hollywood’s golden, pre-MPAA era and out of the history lesson, it mostly just feels like “Famous Tits and Dicks: A Clip Show”, and that’s just a waste.