Widely—and in this author's opinion, rightly—regarded as the best director of his generation, Paul Thomas Anderson has made a career out of zigging when his peers zagged. Following his stylish but compromised debut film Hard Eight—or Sydney, among friends—Anderson vowed never to work without final cut again, and has held to that maxim, making him one of the few directors of his generation to release his subsequent films more or less free from studio interference.
With only eight films to his name, Anderson is far from prolific, but this has created an aura of excitement around the release of each of his films that they might not have had otherwise. His style has evolved as well, with his early work defined by a Scorsese-esque sense of movementto the way he handles his camera, propelling his lengthy narratives forward with admirable momentum.
Post-There Will Be Blood, however, his camera movements have become more controlled, with the director using silence and stillness to create an entirely different breed of powerful imagery.If David Fincher is the heir-apparent to Stanley Kubrick thanks to his meticulousness and technical wizardry, Anderson is much more of the spiritual successor to Robert Altman, weaving together story tapestries that meander and ensemble pictures with multiple protagonists.
As far as sexuality and nudity is concerned, he's inconsistent at best, sometimes building an entire film around it and celebrating it—as he does in Boogie Nights—and sometimes repressing it to the point where it explodes, as he does in The Master. Like the other directors we've already covered in this series, the sex and nudity in his films is uniquely his own. There's no mistaking a P.T. Anderson nude scene, and there's a lot of them to cover, so let's dig in!
Boogie Nights
The conversation regarding sex and nudity in the films of P.T. Anderson could literally begin and end with his second film, 1997's Boogie Nights. Set in the world of the porn industry from the late 70s to the early 80s, the filmtakes a harrowing journey frombacchanal to tragedy, before ultimately endingwith a rather bleakly optimistic conclusion. This theme of an optimism that's ultimately attained by first bringing the film's characters to their lowest point is one that runs throughout Anderson's work.
Make no mistake about it,P.T. Anderson believes in the notion of a happy ending, but he more fervently believes that characters must go through hell to attain that happy ending. Boogie Nights is ultimately a film about family. Sometimes our real family disappoints us by rejecting or abandoning us, so you look for your own family, one that won't abandon you no matter how much or how often you screw up. It's a truly beautiful film in that regard, showing that even the most fucked up misfits among us can still find love and family in the end.
While the money shot ending is perhaps the film's most remembered moment, the biggest contribution it made to many of our lives—and spank banks—was the nude debut of Heather Graham...
Thanks to her roles in such classic flicks as License to Drive,Drugstore Cowboy, Swingers, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Graham was something of a known actress when she appeared in this film. However, none of us were prepared for how absolutely astounding she looked naked, and her performance as Roller Girl remains her most iconic, and most assuredly helped her become the star she remains to this day.
Julianne Moore earned an Oscar nomination for her role as the "mother" of the family, Amber Waves. Never shy about going nude on film, Moore does an amazing nude scene when Dirk shoots his first scene early in the film, a scene which also includes what is one of the most iconic lines in the film...
Also on hand—to lenda modicum of verisimilitude to the proceedings—is adult film legend Nina Hartley, playing the philandering wife of Assistant Director Little Bill (William H. Macy). The adult star's two scenes are among the most memorable in the film, particularly considering her murder at the hands of her husband ends the 1970s on a rather ominous note.
Hartleydished a bit on the film in this interview I did with her and her husband back in 2014. According to her, though, there was very little about the film that resembled the actual porn industry at the time...
"There’s one line when Nicole Ari Parker walks off the stage and says I’m gonna go douche or clean up or whatever, and I was asked,well what would she say? And in the 70s, shaving wasn’t a thing, so she wouldn’t be going off to shave, but douching was a thing back then, so that was one moment of verisimilitude, but everything else is completely movie-land ideas."
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that nearly all of the film's nudity occurs in the first hour, with the only exception being a brief topless lesbian scene (above) featuring adult performers Skye Blue and Summer Cummings...
However, even inthis brief nude scene he's illustrated his point that the "innocence" of the 70s—if there even was such a thing—was dead and gone. Just as the pure celluloid of the 70s was replaced the artificial looking video of the 80s, the "real women" of the 70s porn scene had been summarily replaced by enhanced women doing things Jack Horner never dreamed of doing just a few years earlier.
Magnolia
Anderson's third film is also his most divisive. I'm not sure if its admirers love it more than its haters hate it, but I fall in the former category, finding this to be one of the most remarkable films of the late 90s. Yes, it's overlong and the director himself admitted that during a reddit AMA earlier this year, but it's also one of the most cathartic and depressingly beautiful films ever made.
The film has a rather twisted view of sex and sexuality that plays itself out in many different ways, through its many different characters:
—William H. Macy's Quiz Kid Donnie Smith is a closeted gay man desperate to win the affections of a hunky bartender
—Julianne Moore's Linda Partridge—and her dying husband Earl (Jason Robards)—have both been exceedingly unfaithful to one another and confess as much to Philip Seymour Hoffman's hospice nurse Phil Parma
—Philip Baker Hall's Jimmy Gator is also a rampant adulterer who harbors—or has, perhaps, forgotten about—an even darker sexual secretin his past
—And of course there'sthe never-better Tom Cruise as Frank T.J. Mackey, whose "Seduce Destroy" system of male superiority has only grown more prevalent in this toxic era of the despicable men's rights movement.
Despite its many different displays of often destructive sexual behavior, Magnoliais also one of his least skin-filled. The film's only credited nude scene comes to us courtesy of Melora Walters' Claudia Wilson-Gator just 7 minutes into this 188 minute film...
However, the scene tells you everything you need to know about the character in a very short amount of time. She and a guy she picked up at the bar do some blow and then have a frantic fuck from which she looks thoroughly disconnected. She's using sex and drugs to numb the pain in her life—which won't be revealed for two more hours—and Anderson tells us all this in under a minute. Brilliant stuff.
The Master
It would take 13 years to get some nudity back in P.T.A's filmography, but 2012's The Master would end up being his second most skin-filled flick behind Boogie Nights. The Master starts out as the tale of a wayward soldier named Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) whose early scenes are defined mostly by his rampant sexual deviancy. Within the film's first five minutes we see him pretend to hump a sand woman created by his fellow soldiers on the beach,followed by himjacking off in the ocean in full view of everyone on the beach.
His love of sex is matched only by his violent outbursts and his penchant for making borderline poisonous moonshine from whatever chemicals he can rustle up. His first sexual encounter with an actual woman comes twelve minutes into the film. While working as a photographer at a department store, he invites co-worker Amy Ferguson into his dark room where he serves her one of his toxic cocktails before she offers to show him her breasts...
Freddie's path eventually crosses with that of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the film's surrogate for L. Ron Hubbard. The reserved and calculating Dodd is, of course, attracted to Freddie's sheer, unbridled rage, an explosive id to his bottled up ego. Many critics have pointed out the fact that Dodd is probably also sexually attracted to him, though the film's 1950s setting means that Dodd must keep those potential feelings cautiously under wraps.
The film's masterstroke of sexual explosion, however, comes at the hour and eight minute mark when Dodd is hosting a fun, musical gathering in the home of one of his followers. Freddie is bored by the shenanigans and entertains himself by picturing every woman in the room naked as Dodd sings and dances around...
Freddie, for better or worse, is a true romantic at heart, however. He pines for a woman he loved in his youth named Doris (Madisen Beaty), and his voracious sexual appetite can be seen as him desperately looking for love (as a wise man once said, in all the wrong places). When he is rejected by Dodd and his controlling wife Peggy (Amy Adams) for the last time, he ends up in the loving—and nude—embrace of Winn Manchester (Jennifer Neala Page)...
There is a tenderness and vulnerability in this final sexual encounter in the film, and an absolutely fascinating way for Anderson to wrap things up. Freddie seems to have found acceptance, and in the arms of a woman who doesn't fit the mold of all the other women he's obsessed over throughout the film. It's not overt and Anderson doesn't call attention to it, but I think it's undeniable that Freddie has ended up with a woman who is physically imposing compared to him, in much the same way that Dodd was.
Or maybe I'm just reading into things too much. Either way, this is another P.T. Anderson film with a bleakly optimistic ending.
Inherent Vice
Those who found The Master to be somewhat meandering and unfocused had their "Emperor's New Clothes" moment with his next film, an even more meandering and seemingly aimless adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Anderson's folly was in attempting to adapt Pynchon in the first place, but fans of the author and the director were treated to what will likely be the most faithful adaptation of the author'swork possible.
Set in the paranoid, pot-hazy, post-Manson Family days of Southern California in 1970, Inherent Vice is perhaps the best stoner movie since Cheech Chong stopped making films. Perfectly capturing the state of mind of its protagonist—pot smoking hippie private investigator Larry "Doc" Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix)—the film has a "what were we just talking about" narrative structure that can seemingly best be appreciated when the audience ison a similar wavelength.
One thing you don't need to be high to enjoy, however, is the amazing fully nude scene from Katherine Waterston late in the film's second act. The film has had its fair share of sexual situations up until this point—such as the brief lesbian encounter between Hong Chau and Shannon Collis seen above—but Anderson makes us wait an hour and forty-four minutes into this two and a half hour movie to get our first full-on nude scene.
While not as overtly deviant as his character in The Master,Phoenix's Sportello is that rare stoner who is almost constantly horny. The only sex scene we see him engage in—an encounter with Reese Witherspoon's Penny Kimball is hinted at but not shown—is rather, shall we say, slap happy...
Waterston goes for broke as Doc's ex-old lady Shasta Fay Hepworth, doing her first nude scene in seven years, and spending the better part of seven minutes completely nude in Doc's bungalow. Their destructive love affair is almost doomed to fail, as it has so many times before, but we can't help but root for these two damaged souls to end up together—which, of course, they do because Anderson is nothing if not a hopeless romantic.
Another interesting side note on this film is Anderson's casting of former adult star Belladonna a.k.a. Michelle Sinclair for a lengthy dialogue scene with Phoenix, in which she rather ably holds her own. It's also a non-nude role, which took a lot of people by surprise, though we do get a peek up her skirt at her bethonged booty while sharing some nitrous with our intrepid hero...
I have no doubt there will be more nudity to come from P.T. Anderson, as it is a tool in his arsenal he can't help but return to every now and again. I hope you enjoyed this SKIN-depth look, and I would love to hear your thoughts on Anderson's filmography in the comments section below!
