Why must a belly stand for something? When an ordinary woman strips on film it always becomes controversial. Can't a body just be a body?
There's a scene in the latest Sarah Polley film, Take This Waltz, where Michelle Williams and Sarah Silverman shower with their ageing water aerobics class in a gangly soup of bellies and pubes and shampoo. It is not like most female nude scenes – it's brightly lit, it shows a variety of body shapes, and its purpose is not to titillate. "I'm standing like a caveman," said Silverman of the scene. "It's very DEAD… I'm a human body." Polley explains: "Every time you see a naked woman's body on screen, it's either in a sexual context — or if it's an older woman it's the scene in About Schmidt, where Kathy Bates gets into the hot tub and the whole audience is supposed to scream, and Jack Nicholson is so horrified. I've seen that over and over," she says, "and I find that really offensive that women's bodies are either objectified or used for comic value." And yet.
And yet this scene is discussed in every review, in every interview. The scene had been up and downloaded online weeks before the film even opened in the UK and, as with Lena Dunham's nudity in HBO's Girls (which comes to British telly later this year), critics have flocked around this unusual image of a naked woman with un-surgeried breasts and a convex stomach, hanging their entire conversation on the wobble of a thigh. Where a traditionally attractive woman's body would have been dismissed, plot-wise, as background music, a saggier breast must stand for something. It must be discussed with studied detachment.
The New Yorker saw the shower scene's display of "pudgy corpulence" as an arrow towards the film's underlying theme – that "though everyone is beautiful, some are more beautiful than others", while the New York Times said this single scene of nudity shows that, "young flesh will age; old flesh was once young; time wins in the end". Never is it not mentioned. Which is fine – it makes sense, these are scenes and bodies we rarely see, but in discussing them it exposes our squinting dismay. I wonder what the bodies in next year's Chloë Moretz remake of Carrie will be like – the original having such focus on body-horror, the original having the most naked shower scene ever. Will the new bodies be hairy, pasty, pendulous? Or will that distract from the plot?
It's odd, I think, that in order for nudity to be read as casual, as relaxed, real, the bodies must be anything but – the bodies must be tanned and toned enough to tell no stories at all. If they have bellies, the bellies must stand for something – Dunham was regularly described by critics as "brave", her body "shocking". Silverman warned fans to lower their expectations before watching her nude scene, pre-empting the inevitable analysis. Even when the nudity is meant to be casual, the response is complicated.
However hard female directors like Dunham and Polley work to diversify bodies on screen, throwing their actors and selves to the audiences like live bait, we're not there yet – we're not yet at a place where female nudity is read as anything but either sexy or transgressive. There is not yet an in-between – stretch-marks and cellulite will overshadow any affectionate portrayals of female locker-room intimacy. Anything other than perfection rings bells, provides headlines. Perfect is neutral; imperfect is a talking point.
But we are at the beginning of a curve. Perhaps it will take another generation of directors before their nude scenes are read in the casual way they intended. The more shower scenes we see that aren't styled like Pirelli calendars, the less analysis there will be of them, and the more we'll accept that some women (even beautiful actor women) have thighs the width of waists, and waists the width of chests. That bodies sometimes stand neither for desire, nor repulsion – that sometimes a woman's body is just a body.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/sep/02/female-nudity-film-sarah-silverman
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