By Steven Winn, San Francisco
Chronicle
January 10, 2004
In the opening scene of the hit movie Something's Gotta Give, Jack Nicholson gets an eyeful as his 63-year-old character's much younger girlfriend teasingly starts peeling off her clothes. Later on, in a farcical parallel, he stumbles in on his girlfriend's middle-aged mother, played by Diane Keaton, who's just undressed for bed. Both of them wince, squawk and run for cover.
"I've never seen a woman that age naked," the Nicholson character, Harry Langer, remarks to another man, as if recuperating from a shock.
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Like Harry, people are opening up to nudity in surprising and liberating new ways. In the arts and in real life, the unclothed human form has moved from its traditional and limiting theme - sex - to embrace subjects as diverse as aging, global politics, economics and social satire.
Nudity figures importantly in a spate of recent movies - including In the Cut, Calendar Girls, The Cooler and Something's Gotta Give - but the trend stretches well beyond the big screen.
From nude peace demonstrations during the Iraq war to Broadway's empowerment musical The Full Monty, from suburban families sunning on nude beaches to hot painter John Currin's potently ambivalent canvases of buxom young women and gaunt seniors, bare bodies of all ages, shapes and dispositions are everywhere, insisting they be seen in their own light.
Conceptual artist Spencer Tunick has seized the moment, traveling the world to photograph assemblages of up to 7,000 unclothed volunteers in public spaces. His nude-installation project was profiled recently in an HBO documentary.
More than sex
Once regarded as the province of the hard-bodied young (and nudist-colony fringe), nudity has grown more familiar and more broadly accepted in the culture. In doing so, it's taken on a wider and more nuanced range of meanings.
The classic purveyors of sexually arousing flesh, as a result, seem hopelessly out of phase. Middle-aged Playboy, in its 50th-anniversary issue, is still proffering the shellacked, gravity-confounding pinups of a bygone vintage.
And television is famously crowded with fully or partially nude folk these days. But here, too, brassy "reality" often comes off with a dully manufactured shine. On a recent episode of Blind Date, Bo kept telling Tiffany how comfortable he is with nudity. To prove it, as they strolled together on a beach, he yanked off his clothes and did a couple of back flips.
Contrast that with the casually integrated nudity that turns up on cable shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City. Or consider the witty and dramatically effective treatment nudity gets in two very different films.
Calendar Girls, loosely based on a true story, follows a group of late-middle-aged women in a provincial English village who decide to raise money for a local hospital by posing for a nude calendar. On the surface, it's a female Full Monty, full of giggles, abashment and the sudden body bravery of people taking control of their destiny. But Calendar Girls has more amplitude, from the sweetly elegiac episode that launches the plot to the moral dilemmas that divide the characters when their calendar becomes a runaway success.
Encased in his cheap suits, thick flap of hair and defeatist scowl, William H. Macy is more ghost than corporeal being in The Cooler. When a pretty waitress (Maria Bello) comes on to this Vegas loser, he can't quite fathom his uncharacteristic luck. It's not what it seems, as many things aren't in this dark fable of trial and redemption. The couple's first nude love scene registers the movie's shifting, elusive surface and underlying intensity to perfection.
A slow transformation
The new nudity has evolved gradually over the years, driven by a variety of social forces. It began with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, marked by such Dionysian signposts as I Am Curious - Yellow on film and Hair and Oh! Calcutta! on Broadway. The liberation movements of women and gays in the 1970s and '80s expanded consciousness.
Not that it all went swimmingly. Nudity was a key battleground in the late-20th century culture wars. But once their shock effect settled down and settled in, the X-rated Midnight Cowboy, Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of homoerotic subjects and Karen Finley's food-enhanced performance pieces enlarged the public conception of nudity in a culture that tended to toggle between Puritan reserve and prefabricated titillation. Hidden or buried ideas about the psychology of repression, body politics, violence against women and gays and more have gradually come out in the open.
Two other factors have exerted a powerful transforming effect. First, with the triumph of the Internet, imagery previously cordoned off has become almost universally accessible. For better or worse, nudity is ubiquitous on the Net - often tawdry, sometimes disturbing, occasionally funny and even instructive.
And an aging baby-boomer population determined not to age has also changed the nudity landscape. It no longer raises great controversy or even an eyebrow when middle-aged stars (Meg Ryan, Harvey Keitel, Kathy Bates, Frances McDormand, Julie Andrews) appear nude or partially nude. They're just riding the prevailing cultural wind.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service
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