In our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Nude Scene, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sex scenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. This week, Julie Michaels gets out of the shower nude to kick the hell out of Keanu Reeves in Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break!
Some films simply cannot be appreciated for what they were attempting to do within their own time. Whenever a film comes along that looks and feels like a genre picture but seems to simultaneously be subverting the expectations of said genre, it's often immediately derided and only later given its proper reconsideration. Sometimes it happens very quickly after the film's release, like Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers which—for some reason—was taken at face value in 1997, but by the time it hit home video the following year, people began to revel in its bitingly satirical take on the material.
Other films take a lot more time than that, one of the best examples of which is Kathryn Bigelow's fourth feature film, 1991's Point Break. While the film was a modest success in its day, earning back a little more than three times its $24 million budget at the worldwide box office, but it wasn't an immediate cultural touchstone the way audiences now must assume it had to have been. The film's entire aesthetic has been aped to death, mostly by the string of macho male 90s action movies that followed in its wake, all clearly unaware of Point Break's not-so-subtle subtext.
Bigelow is a total outlier amongst her female director peers, someone who has trafficked in the world of high-octane machismo throughout her career, always bringing a unique viewpoint that her male counterparts could never quite capture. If you put a gun to my head, the one male director I'd say comes close is Predator and Die Hard director John McTiernan. However, even his films present the heroes as impervious machines built to withstand an onslaught. Bigelow, on the other hand, digs deeper behind that macho façade of such characters to find the hollowness within their public persona.
Both of the male leads in Point Break—Keanu's FBI agent Johnny Utah and Patrick Swayze's zen master criminal Bodhi—are the kind of archetypes one might expect to find in an action movie. Okay, maybe not a philosophical surfer with a death wish, but that kind of criminal without a conscious who thinks he's on the side of universal good is a major action stereotype. However, both Bigelow's direction andW. Peter Iliff's script show these characters for the scared little boys that they truly are at heart. No other action film at the time would dare cast such aspersions on their main hero or their antagonist.
It's similarly hard to imagine a male director allowing the hero to get his ass kicked by a woman, but Bigelow likely had no such qualms when making her film. 53 minutes into the film, Keanu's Johnny Utah and his partner Agent Pappas (played by the one and only Gary Busey) blow an entire undercover DEA operation by raiding the house of a group of surfers they think are the bank robbing Ex-Presidents. You may likely remember this as the scene where Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Keidis gets shot in the foot in hilarious fashion, but the true scene stealer here is Julie Michaels! She's in the shower when the raid kicks off and she corners Johnny in the bathroom, beating his ass like a rented mule...
This isn't just some situation where the naked woman gets it one good punch before she gets taken out herself. She savages his ass in a bathroom, kicking him, hitting his head into a mirror, and basically making a mockery of him as a character in the process. She even stabs another FBI agent in the back twice before Busey's Pappas—a man who clearly has no problems hitting a woman—knocks her out.
Now listen, I'm not here to tell you that Point Break is some secret feminist manifesto because of this one scene. It's full of all the macho male posturing you'd expect from any action film made at the time. The difference here is that Bigelow is happy to expose the fraudulence of such posturing, allowing the men to act the way men do in action movies, only with a much more cynical eye cast on such behavior.
Point Break is, at its heart, a platonic romance between Johnny and Bodhi, two menwith tremendousmutual respect and admiration for one another, but whose wildly different interpretations of good and evil set them against one another. The film is smart enough to give Lori Petty's Tyler some agency, because she bounces from both of their lives when she learns the truth about Johnny being a fed. Any other action movie at the time would've reunited them, had Tyler "come to her senses" and go back to Johnny when the whole thing got sorted out.
I'd hazard a guess that Bigelow knows women better than most male action movie screenwriters, so she knows this is the more realistic way for things to shake out between the two. However, it's really that ass-kicking doled out to Keanu at the hands of a naked Julie Michaels that truly shows how transcendent action films can be when they subvert expectations in such radical ways.
Catch up with our most recent editions ofAnatomy of a Nude Scene
—Alexis Dziena Gives Aging Lothario Bill Murray an Eyeful in Broken Flowers
—P.J. Soles Establishes a Key Horror Movie Trope in John Carpenter'sHalloween
—Can We Talk About Linnea Quigley's Barbie Doll Crotch inReturn of the Living Dead?
—Innocent BloodFinds John Landis Trying to Get HisAmerican WerewolfMojo Back
—The Insane Japanese Horror MovieHouseFeatures Equally Insane Nudity
—Howard Stern'sPrivate PartsLives Up to Its Titular Promise
—Neve Campbell Wastes No Time Making Her Nude Debut inWhen Will I Be Loved
—Amy Locane GetsCarried Awayf rom Melrose Place to Bang Dennis Hopper
—The Shape of WaterOpens with Sally Hawkins Masturbating in the Tub
—Jennifer Jason Leigh Gets the Drop on Bridget Fonda inSingle White Female
—Monique Gabrielle EnsuresBachelor Partyis an Affair to Remember
—An Entire Generation of Men Saw Bare Breasts for the First Time inCaddyshack
—Maggie Gyllenhaal Holds Nothing Back inSecretary
—Demi Moore Took a Record Paycheck to HeadlineStriptease
**Click Here to Read All Past Editions of Anatomy of a Nude Scene/Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy**
