In our new weekly series Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy.
2014's sci-fi flickUnder the Skindidn't exactly set the box office on fire, and that's a damn shame. It's one of the few truly esotericEnglish-languagefilms of the new millennium, but at the same time, those kinds of film rarely find success in this country. Another reason the film's failure is baffling is that it featured the nude debut of Scarlett Johansson. Scarlett had flirted with nudity before showing off major sideboob in A Love Song for Bobby Long...
...some major cleavage in He's Just Not That Into You...
...see-through panties in Lost in Translation...
...and slipping a nip in A Good Woman...
But this was a fully nude debut for the ages with a boner-fide A-lister stripping it all off and examining herself in the mirror for an extended period of time...
Everybody's got an opinion on what this nude scene "means" and they rarely match up. They all hover around the same handful of themes, but the meaning is different to almost everyone. David Dudek of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel saw the horror in it...
"And, finally, there is Johansson, who allows herself to be transformed into a design element — white skin, black hair, red lips and dead eyes reflected in the rear-view mirror. And by appearing fully nude, she transforms the sexual identity thrust upon her into a thing of terror and mystery."
Leo Robson of The Guardian saw it differently, with the camera's constant detachment creating a coldly aesthetic distance from the nudity...
"The film recallsthe SF thriller Species—about ahalf-alien/half-human who develops a sexual appetite—but as remade with a stern coldness learned from KubrickorTarkovsky; ifUnder the Skincommunicates any gender-politics message, it does sothrough thedisparity in excitement between the male characters' reaction to(Johansson) and that of the camera."
In The Atlantic, Noah Gittell sees the scene as clinical and ponders why it seemed to go unnoticed...
"In a key scene late in the film, she takes off her clothes and stands nude before a mirror. Now, you would think the first nude scene by a Hollywood star whose body has been the subject of such intense scrutiny would be big news. But the way the film frames it—with Johansson having removed almost all of her personality from the character—it doesn’t play as even remotely sexual, and the scene, remarkably, barely attracted any hype."
This gets into a larger point I think Glazer and Johansson are both getting at with the scene. It is the first time her character has stopped to admire how beautiful she is and how easily she was able to seduce and destroy so many young men. Her empathetic encounter with a disfigured man (Adam Pearson) has made her question her mission and her motives, sending her on a journey of self-discovery. That this ultimately leads to her downfall isn't totally surprising, but it's hard to miss the point when composer Mica Levi uses music cues to draw direct parallels between Johansson's earlier scenes as predator and her third act role as prey.
This scene isn't even Scarlett's nude debut proper. That comes eight minutes in whenher alien character enters a white room naked and takes the clothes from her predecessor (Lynsey Taylor Mackay)...
She then tools around Scotland in a van, looking for vulnerable young men that she can easily seduce—she looks like Scarlett Johansson, I mean, come on—and then lures them back to a house where they are absorbed into the floor while attempting to reach a stripping Scarlett...
There's really no heterosexual man alive that wouldn't be duped in the same way, but the hype surrounding this being Scarlett's nude debut didn't quite hit Mr. Skin's offices the same way they hit those of the more high-minded film critics. We were beside ourselves, thrilled that an A-list star had made such an amazing nude debut.
Once we posted the pics, however, the general consensus we heard from commenters was thatScarlett's body was "not that great" leading me to wonder why men hold women to such unreal standards in our society. When these men'sperception was shattered by reality, the first impulse they had was to blame Scarlett for not having a better body, when in actuality, they should have looked inward to think about why their standards were so unrealistic.
Fantasy gets the better of us time and time again, but it also prevents many men from seeing the glory that is a naked woman in front of them. I'm not sayinga man has to be attracted to every naked woman he sees, I'm saying that the man has to at least appreciate the woman's willingness to make themselves vulnerable in front of the world. There is a beauty to that, even if it's not the kind of beauty that appeals directly to their tastes.
Ultimately, for me, this is what Under the Skin is getting at, the notion that sex is power, and the minute Scarlett's character stops believing in that mission, she comes unraveled.As soon asshe stops to appreciate the beauty in another human being's vulnerability—in this case, a disfigured man—and sees that there is perhaps another element to sex she hadn't considered, this wicked world swallows her whole. The moment she yields her sexual dominance to men, her destruction becomes imminent.
The film, again in my opinion, is a deliberately constructed dissection of sex and gender politics. It plays to me as a bold feminist parable that shows how women can be summarily destroyed by men the moment they let their guard down enough to trust the wrong one. You may read the film as something else entirely, but I think that how one views the film's centerpiece nude scene speaks volumes about how they view the world. If you see a beautiful woman discovering the inherent beauty in her naked body, you've got the right idea. If you look at this scene and think, "Meh, I've seen better," you're part of the problem.
Go ahead, destroy me in the comments section below.
