The casual teenage nudity of the 1970s

One of the first actresses I ever had a crush on was Brooke Shields. All I needed was a glimpse of her in The Blue Lagoon and I was smitten. I would have been no more than ten, which is maybe early for starting to notice the opposite sex -- maybe I was ahead of my time.

It might be that all I got was that glimpse, as my official records don't show me as having seen the whole movie. I'm pretty sure I caught Blue Lagoon, parts of it anyway, on cable at a friend's house, so it may be time to add it to my lists. But Brooke in skimpy clothing -- it's one of those movies where their nudity is covered by coconuts and well-placed hair, if I remember correctly -- was enough to send me down a Brooke Shields rabbit hole, resulting in a viewing of the considerably more adult-oriented Endless Love around the same time. (Didn't think you could go down rabbit holes in the early 1980s? Apparently you could.)

I still wanted to see more, and I sure did see more of Brooke Shields in the earliest of those three films, 1978's Pretty Baby. I don't remember much about Franco Zefferelli's film, but I remember one scene with absolute clarity: Brooke Shields, who would have been about 12 at the time of filming, jumping up and down on a bed, fully naked. 

You might think this is what I wanted, what had been teased in the comparatively chaste Blue Lagoon two years later. But even as a ten-year-old I remember feeling skeeved out by it. Here is this girl, who would have been only two years older than I was at the time she filmed it, jumping up and down in her birthday suit, without any breasts or pubic hair to speak of it. It wasn't right.

I was reminded of my Pretty Baby experience last night while watching my latest 1970s horror this October, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1977). 

Before we get into genre quibbling, I'll say that Nicolas Gessner's film might be more comfortable in the thriller or mystery genres than horror, but I went by the poster art above to decide it made a good viewing for the month leading up to Halloween. The movie's opening scene also takes place on Halloween, which doubles as the birthday for the main character, played by Jodie Foster.

Whether it's a horror or a thriller or a costume drama has no relevance for what I want to talk about today, which is another instance of teenage nudity, and a very matter-of-fact inclusion of themes related to child sexuality on the whole.

In that opening scene, when the movie is barely five minutes old, we see Martin Sheen's character perving on the 13-year-old Foster. He's come to visit her house under the guise of trick-or-treating, but his children aren't with him -- he's run on ahead of them, perhaps for the very opportunity to perv on Foster's Rynn Jacobs. 

After he invites himself in, first we can't tell if he's calling her pretty and touching her hair just as some kind of overly forward attempt to be charming, something that would have been more common back then and would have fallen away in the decades since. Pretty quickly, though, his advances become unmistakeably sexual, and are confirmed when he gets called out on it and quickly scampers out of the house before his own children have a chance to arrive. (They're stepchildren, we later find out, which makes more sense.)

The fact that Martin Sheen is casually a pedophile in this movie is interesting for a couple reasons. For one it reminded me that before he began playing almost exclusively good guys later in his career, Sheen could be a real weirdo on screen. He played sort of a psycho in Terrence Malick's Badlands in 1973, a few years before this, and a few years after this, he's the sinister presidential candidate in David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone. Playing a pedophile would not have made anybody blink at that time.

But the thing that's really strange about it is how it forefronts the sexuality of a 13-year-old girl. Foster was born in 1962, so when filming took place, presumably in 1975, she would have actually been 13 -- maybe only 12, as her birthday is late in the year. Wikipedia doesn't say exactly when filming occurred, but the movie was ready for Cannes in 1976, its general release delayed until 1977 due to the sorts of controversies I'm writing about here.

Not only does Sheen treat her as a sexual object in his every interaction with her, but the film itself does as well. She's also got a relationship that becomes actually sexual with a teenager a few years older than her, played by Scott Jacoby, who reminded me so much of Matthew Modine that I had to check to make sure it was not actually him. The existence of that relationship alone would not be enough to posit a perviness on the part of the filmmakers, but the following is.

There's randomly a scene that shows Foster stripping down naked to get in bed with Jacoby's character. We see her from behind and from the side, but her rear is fully visible and there's a very clear side view of her 13-year-old breasts, which have enough hang to them to qualify as adult breasts. There's absolutely no reason this needed to be in there, except that, according to Wikipedia, a producer wanted there to be "sex and violence" in the film. Yikes. 

At the time I was watching the film I did not know this, but it's not actually Foster we see in that shot. Her older sister Connie did a nude double for her, and Connie seems to have been 21 at the time. I'd like to go back and watch that shot to see what trickery they did to create the illusion that it was Jodie rather than Connie, because I certainly didn't suspect I was looking at anything other than Jodie Foster in that shot. However, whether the actress was of legal age or not is besides the point. The film wants us to believe we are seeing a naked 13-year-old girl. Apparently, this was not something we minded at the time -- and perhaps even something we were supposed to like?

It must have been weird to be Jodie Foster at that time, as she also made Taxi Driver, where she plays a child prostitute. That film, released in February of 1976, would have been released concurrently with the production on The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, but you'd think principal photography would have already been finished if the film were set to appear at Cannes in May. So it appears that multiple filmmakers imagined something sexual about her even when she was just a 12-year-old. And that apparently, this was not universally scorned. (Thank goodness Freaky Friday was released between these two films to give her public image some additional dimension.)

We are so nervous about these issues today that not only would you never come close to child nudity in a film today, but you'd barely even suggest anything related to child sexuality. We don't want to make films in which pedophiles appear even if it is absolutely 100% clear that that character is the scum of the earth. 

In reading up a little more, it seems that these choices were controversial even at the time, not just in hindsight. Regarding Pretty Baby, Wikipedia states:

Pretty Baby received an R rating in the United States, an X rating in the United Kingdom, and an R18+ rating in Australia, for nudity and sexual content. Continuing controversy over Shields' nude scenes resulted in the film being banned in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan until it was repealed in 1995. Gossip columnist Rona Barrett called the film "child pornography", and director Louis Malle allegedly was portrayed as a "combination of Lolita's Humbert Humbert and (by that point) controversial director Roman Polanski".^[1]

Okay that seems pretty clear. Although the delay in the release of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane was due to a court case over distribution rights, the controversy over the nude scene is listed in Wikipedia's opening two paragraphs about it, as word got out that Foster had a conflict with producers about it and actually walked off the set. I guess her older sister eventually had no such qualms. (The nude scene was removed for the VHS release but restored for the DVD release.)

So in the subject of this post I made it sound like this sort of thing happened all the time, but maybe I've just stumbled across two of the more egregious examples. The fact that I cannot immediately recall any other examples, despite seeing my fair share of films from that era, seems to support the relative scarcity. 

The funny thing is, apparently even The Blue Lagoon, which I thought was comparatively chaste, has a number of scenes that might qualify as nude scenes, some involving body doubles for Shields, who was still underage at that time. Reading up on the parental guide on IMDB, I found that you can clearly see Christopher Atkins' penis at a couple points, and there's even a masturbation scene, which must have been really confusing to me at that time. Atkins would have been 18 or 19 at the time of filming, at least. The other scenes where they appear without clothes are obscured underwater, so maybe not as graphic -- which is also maybe why the more in-your-face scenes in Pretty Baby shocked me so much.

Nowadays we won't even do infant nudity on screen. Back then, on the other hand, I don't believe that a young naked Clark Kent in the original Superman (1978) even raised any eyebrows, because everybody knows that a naked child under the age of three is not sexual -- we would hope. (Apparently there is also a naked baby in the later portions of The Blue Lagoon.) 

Today? The naked underwater baby who is portrayed as reaching for a dollar bill on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind has filed a lawsuit alleging "child sexual exploitation." I suppose neither extreme is particularly useful for society.  

Easily avoiding "strong nudity, strong sex scenes"

I saw a very compelling movie last night about a dangerous loner in the age of social influencers and Russian bots, called The Hater. It's Polish. It just debuted on Netflix on Wednesday, and I'll be reviewing it. In fact, I may have already by the time you read this.

As it started, though, the 13-year-old kid in me got a little excited when I saw Netflix warn us that the movie contained "strong nudity, strong sex scenes."

When I saw what it was, I had to laugh -- and write this post.

Oh, it was strong nudity and strong sex alright. But it could have been lifted right out and probably made the film far less problematic -- at least if it were playing in regular theaters, rather than Netflix.

So I should say that of course I'm not opposed to "strong nudity, strong sex scenes" in a film, if it really needs it. Maybe even sometimes if it doesn't really need it. But when it really doesn't need it, it's just silly.

So at one point during the movie, the main character is breaking into a location -- it isn't necessary to explain what location, since this post isn't about the plot. The security guard has unexpectedly returned to his post, and the interloper has gotten stuck in the very same room with him. The interloper recedes into the shadows to see what will happen.

What will happen is the security guard starts watching porn. As you do.

And it's realistic porn. In other words, for about three seconds, you see a penis being inserted into a vagina, in the doggy style position if you must know. It's not the main image on screen, as you see it over the guard's shoulder as the character would, but it's clearly visible and there's no mistaking what's going on.

Did you really need that much verisimilitude, director Jan Komasa?

Movies have been showing characters watching porn for decades, but they don't have to actually, you know, show porn. You can play some sounds of characters in the throes of ecstasy and then just show their upper bodies. That communicates what's going on well enough. You can even get away with it in a PG movie by not showing any nudity, and the audience is still well aware what is happening.

But no, Jan Komasa thought that a throwaway scene in his movie would be made that much more, I don't know, realistic if you saw that penis going into that vagina.

It seems likely to be the first time a penis has ever gone into a vagina on Netflix. There may have been another instance, but I'm hard-pressed to imagine what it might have been. Did In the Realm of the Senses ever play on Netflix?

I almost wonder if Komasa did it as a gag, on a dare from his friends to see if he could get away with it. "Okay, Jan, you've got the power. You're going to put porn on Netflix."

Because if I were a 13-year-old boy, I'd be all over the "back ten seconds" button on that one.

Is naked the same as nude?

So I joked on Thursday about "dirty old men" being one of the intended demographics for Red Riding Hood. That may have been a somewhat subjective assessment of the film, and it may be closer to the truth than I'd like to admit. (Most good jokes are, aren't they?)

You see, I seem to have developed something of a fascination with Amanda Seyfried. There's just something unique about her. She's beautiful, there's no doubt about that -- but she's not cookie-cutter beautiful. Her big, round eyes set her apart, and there's something girl-next-doorish about her. I guess you'd describe it as an unconventional type of beauty, but that's not exactly it either, because unconventional beauty is not traditionally agreed upon by everyone -- and I think almost everyone can see the beauty in Ms. Seyfried. (Sigh-fred, not Say-freed, as I've learned just this past week.)

And so I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the promise of Ms. Sigh-fred appearing nude in Chloe was one of the reasons I prioritized watching it. Fortunately, since I am also a follower of the career of director Atom Egoyan and have seen most of his movies, that wasn't the only reason. But I try to be honest with you, my dear readers, and I know you won't hold it against me if I admit that I wanted to see what Ms. Sigh-fred's boobs look like. (She's 25 years old, or only 12 years younger than me, so it really doesn't make me that dirty.)

Only I didn't get to see them, or I didn't really. I never got what you would call a clear look at them.

And that made me ponder the difference between "appearing naked" and "nudity."

Seyfried is definitely naked, a couple times, in Chloe. But I wouldn't say she's ever actually "nude." And that's because there are lots of ways to film/photograph people being naked, without showing "the good parts." It's why celebrities appear "naked" on the front of countless respectable magazines, but never appear "nude."

In order to have actual nudity, you have to have show one of the following:

1) The right nipple;

2) The left nipple;

3) Public hair;

4) A penis (men only, ha ha).

And if it's male nudity, only the fourth one really counts -- male pubic hair is not real nudity.

This introduces a lot of paradoxes. It means you can spend an entire movie without a stitch of clothing on, and never once actually be "nude," depending on how cleverly you're shot. It also means that you can have all your clothes on, and still be "nude," if the action calls for one of your nipples poking out of your shirt (and only if you're a woman; male nipples, of course, are not nudity).

Another paradox is that showing your butt is no longer considered nudity. It was at one time. But possibly around the time Dennis Franz showed his butt on NYPD Blue (which was probably 20 years ago now), the derriere was officially no longer nudity. This is why when we saw Jennifer Aniston's butt in The Break-Up, no one really got all that excited about it. Yeah, there was talk about how Aniston was showing her butt, but it couldn't properly be characterized as a "nude scene" -- even though Aniston was naked in the scene, and she showed her butt. Nor could it be characterized as a risk on Aniston's part -- it was just keeping with her career-long attitudes toward showing her goods.

And so yeah, not much that you could characterize as actual nudity on Seyfried's part in Chloe. A lot of butt. A lot of back and legs. A lot of "side boob" -- another kind of one-time nudity that has since been de-classified as such. Even one shot from the front that's so brief and so obscured that it doesn't really qualify. You couldn't walk away from Chloe saying that Seyfried wasn't naked -- she most certainly was. But nude? Not really.

You do get nudity in Chloe, but it's all courtesy of Julianne Moore, who practically has a clause in her contract requiring nudity. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Moore has appeared nude in a third of her films, and at least half the films she appeared in that had an R rating. In fact, one of the most famous bottomless scenes in movie history is from Robert Altman's Short Cuts, when Moore has something like a five-minute argument on screen, all the time completely naked from the waist down.

And this brings up another interesting thing about nudity, something I am certainly not the first person to observe. Why is female pubic hair considered the Holy Grail of nudity? Again I am not the first to say this, but it's just hair. There shouldn't be anything inherently titillating about hair. Yet when a woman goes nude below the waist in a movie, it doubles or triples our notion of how daring she is, how much she's willing to expose herself. And of course it sends ratings boards into a tizzy. Just from a little hair.

In an era where a bikini can be shown on TV as long as there are teeny, tiny patches of fabric covering the nipples and the pubic hair, it makes me wonder if the societal opposition to nudity will one day fall entirely, just as the word "fuck" may one day be permitted to play on TV. I guess I have to say I doubt it. The political groups on both sides of the aisle who oppose indecency, for different reasons, may have less and less of a leg to stand on, but it'll be a long time before they allow themselves to be legless.

But here's the real thing about nudity -- it's not even really what we're looking for, per se, when we watch a movie that's meant to titillate us. One of the sexiest performances I can think of in a mainstream film is the performance submitted by Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. As far as I recall, Watts is neither naked nor nude at any point during the film, though she's done both things since then. And she does have a famous scene of masturbation in Mulholland Drive, but that's not even what I'm talking about when I say her performance is sexy -- that scene has more to do with a weird kind of violence against herself. No, I'm thinking of the scene where she's on that audition, and she's involved in a kiss with one of the other auditioning actors -- who I think may also be one of the producers or something, creating a weird power dynamic during the kiss. I saw the movie only once, ten years ago, and frankly, did not like it very much. But that scene sticks with me because of how hot Watts made it, and probably always will.

So, Chloe. It had some of what made Mulholland Drive sexy, but it also ended up feeling fairly banal to me in many other respects. It's what I'd heard about Chloe, with one exception -- another blogger whose opinion I trust. Well, if you're reading this, sorry -- I just didn't see it. Mild thumbs down for me.

But it was fun to see Amanda Seyfried's side-boob. ;-)

Is thinking you saw the same as seeing?

I usually write my Friday blog posts, which are often tied to one (or more) of that week's new releases, at my desk at work, early, before my co-workers come in. Because of that, they are necessarily speculative posts, either making a prediction of the film's quality based on available evidence (which I've been told is a critically suspect exercise, and I partly agree), or writing about some larger trend of which the movie in question is emblematic.

This week, however, I'm home on paternity leave -- I should put that in quotation marks, because I'm taking vacation days to do it -- so my Friday new-release post gets to be about a movie I've actually seen.

This afternoon, I finagled some time away from the wife and child to Feed the Beast, and I saw Machete, the Robert Rodriguez-directed (with a hand from some guy named Ethan Maniquis) full-length version of a trailer Rodriguez created for Grindhouse -- a Mexploitation film starring Danny Trejo.

But if you've been reading my blog for long, you know that my focus is not usually reviews, so I'm not going to submit a review of Machete just because I've seen it early enough to be timely with the review. If it ain't broke, why fix it? (And if it is broke, please just allow me to continue on in my ignorance of that fact.)

Instead, I want to talk about Lindsay Lohan's boobs.

Which do not make an appearance in Machete. But if you're not a very discriminating audience member, you might think that they do.

See, Lohan plays a character that the poster you see here wants you to think is nicknamed "The Sister." That's a bit of exploitation hype that has only to do with the marketing of the movie. Lohan is actually the daughter of a corrupt political aide who wants to make a career as an erotic internet model. It's not spoiling much to tell you that she gets kidnapped, nude, and stashed in a church. Upon awakening, she dresses herself in a nun's habit, because it's the only available clothing. The fact that she suddenly has skills with an automatic weapon is just fetishistic violent fluff.

So right before she gets kidnapped, she's making out in a pool -- alongside her mother -- with Machete. Both women are naked, and in this particular shot, both bear their breasts for all the world to see.

Except it's not really Lohan. It's a body double.

(The woman playing her mother, an actress named Alicia Marek, appears to be doing the stunt herself.)

I knew it right away. The woman who's supposed to be Lohan's character, April, is turned in to Trejo's body, so her face can't be seen. In fact, it doesn't even look like they made a very earnest attempt to duplicate Lohan's hairstyle on the body double. If the blatant disguising of her face were not evidence enough, I knew also that Lindsay Lohan -- no matter how far she may have fallen -- is one of those actresses who's squeamish about nudity. Kind of like her Machete co-star Jessica Alba, who has an almost nude scene herself, where the positioning of her arms and legs covers everything you might want to see.

But what about all those innocents out there who don't know about body doubles, who leave Machete telling their friends that Lindsay Lohan gets topless in it? Is thinking you saw Lindsay Lohan's boobs the same as actually seeing Lindsay Lohan's boobs?

When thinking about body doubles, I always think back -- for some reason -- to the movie Slums of Beverly Hills. Marisa Tomei's in the movie, and she uses a body double for a quick topless scene. Of course, the Marisa Tomei of 2007-2010 is much different than the Marisa Tomei of 1998 -- she practically has a clause in her contracts requiring nudity these days. Back then, however, she was far more prudish. And I clearly remember the one body double shot, where you see basically a pair of boobs on screen, and that's it -- no head, and not much of a belly either. Just the boobs. They could have been anybody's boobs, even the boobs of a blonde or a redhead.

But I remember thinking at the time that there were certainly many people watching that movie who thought they were seeing Marisa Tomei's boobs. And thinking that if she really wanted to maintain the reputation of an actress who doesn't do nudity, she shouldn't even have a body double who would fool certain naive viewers into thinking they saw her boobs. I remember thinking that there should be some kind of pop-up that occurred during the movie, complete with an asterisk, that said "Not Marisa Tomei's boobs!" Just to prevent any possible confusion.

And now the one TMZ calls "Lilo" is in the same situation. Just think of all those sweet simpletons in the heartland of America, who don't know a body double from a key grip from a dolly grip from a green screen, who will now spend the rest of their lives thinking that they glimpsed the promised land: the supple young breasts of one of Hollywood's most lusted after pieces of former jailbait. And because they may not have any acquaintances who will correct that misconception, they may go to their graves thinking they know what Lilo's breasts look like. Could this kind of ignorance be bliss?

I guess for Lindsay Lohan, it really doesn't matter anymore. You might ask why she doesn't just go ahead and do nudity -- heck, maybe do a whole sex tape. She's definitely sunk to the kind of professional and personal depths in which a sex tape would not necessarily be considered a step downward. When you think about it, there are two reasons most actresses don't want to do nudity: 1) They think it demeans them, and they want to keep the mystique of their private body intact; 2) They think it will negatively impact their career, will keep them from getting cast in movies financed by Disney, for example. Well, Lohan's Disney days are long over. If she wanted to show some nipples, even some muff, it might only help her.

And actually, there is some satisfaction in Machete for the prurient viewers out there. There's one scene, right before she dons that habit, when Lohan's long curls are only barely covering their curvaceous fleshy neighbors to the south. Yes, the real Lohan, not her double. As she goes from seated to standing up, the hair brushes aside long enough for one pretty clear shot of a nipple. It won't make very useful spank material, even for people who can pause their eventual DVD copies of the film, but it is there -- a certified Lohan nipple spotting. Lord be praised.

Thankfully, that's not the only reason to see Machete. I said I wouldn't submit a full Machete review, but it would be cruel to leave you without saying something of substance about it. So I'll tell you that although Machete is quite entertaining, it would have been a lot more so with 20 fewer minutes and about five fewer characters. The number of different bad guys in this movie nearly makes your head spin, and while some of that casting is deceptively brilliant (Jeff Fahey, Steven Seagal), other stunt casting doesn't really register the way it should (Don Johnson). Also, I'll say the movie needed a bit more of the Grindhouse grunge of Rodriguez' Planet Terror, in which it looked like the film stock was nearly falling apart there on the reel. Here, Rodriguez and Maniquis apply that look haphazardly, and the film in general looks a lot cleaner than it should. Whether that was their artistic choice or the artistic choice of Twentieth Century Fox, it's hard to say.

Oh, and Danny Trejo is one awesome action star who shouldn't have had to wait this long for his own badass vehicle.

With that, I bid you a-boob -- I mean, adieu.