Welcome to our Nudity is Necessary series. Today's film is a surprising one, but I realized that the plot of the film centers around sex. That means that the nudity was definitely necessary! Let's talk in detail about 1993's erotic thriller Body of Evidence starring the nude Madonna at the height of her fame.
Let's get one thing out of the way: Body of Evidence is not a masterpiece. It might be a skintastic film, but it was a box office and critical bomb. After the success of 1992's epic erotic thriller Basic Instinct, erotic films that came after were compared. They were also expected to push the envelope...while being criticized when they pushed it too far.
Enter Madonna. Early 90s Madonna was incredibly interested in pushing the envelope. She was also very interested in sex...lots of it. She released her album Erotica. She wrote erotica and took naughty photos for her book simply titled Sex. Her music video for "Justify My Love" was banned on MTV for being too explicit. She even displayed her fellatio technique in her documentary Truth or Dare.
Dare Madonna to take off her clothes in the early 90s and she would be five steps ahead of you. She was ready and willing to take her clothes off and finally film some sex scenes.
The film opens with cops arriving to a crime scene where a man was murdered while in the act. At least he died doing what he loved! When the cops investigate the scene (quite vocally), they notice that a sex tape is in the VCR. Who's on the tape? Madonna!
Madonna plays Rebecca Carlson, a tempting hottie with bleach-blonde locks reminiscent of a Hitchcock heroine. She is married to a rich old guy who ends up changing his will to give her a ton of money. Thus she kills him to get her hands on the eight million dollars...she kills him with "increasingly strenuous sex, knowing he had a heart condition". She gave him cocaine and proved that she had the endurance and the stamina to handle marathon-level sex.
Willem Dafoe is defending Madonna for murder, but he gets curious about her - ehem - murder weapon. It does not take long for the two of them to start banging. And boy do they bang!
Why were these scenes necessary? It's because her character quite literally killed men with sex. Thus we had to see sex! And, boy, do they have sex. They have very graphic sex.
A note on these sex scenes: they seem very rigorous and realistic. Word on the street was that Madonna picked Dafoe herself to play her costar because she heard rumors of his huge hog. Who cares about his downstairs when we see Madonna's? We watch her get eaten out in a parking lot, pouring hot candlewax on her lover, masturbating in front of a roaring fireplace, and handcuffing men while she rides them. This is all getting VERY hot. In fact, these scenes put the "erotic" in erotic thriller.
Do you want to see these scenes for yourself? You're at the right place. Check out the parking garage oral sex scene right here:
Critics were brutal to this film. So were the ratings. It was released with an NC-17 rating, but that rating was still rather new and the filmmakers wondered whether or not the NC-17 rating would be treated with the same curiosity as X a decade prior. Nope!
The rating scared audiences and critics seemed to already be bored of Madonna taking off her clothes. Bored? How could you ever be bored with an A-list beauty having sex on screen?! As we said, the nudity here was necessary. Imagine a film about a woman who killed her husband with brutal sex and we don't see a hint of skin. That would be just plain bizarre.
Madonna needed to take her clothes off (and it helped that she wanted to). It is unfortunate that critics assumed this film was a "Madonna sex project" and not a film that just so happened to star Madonna. It is possible that the timing of this film, coming off of the other things listed above, might have hurt the film. Rumors flew that Madonna directed her own sex scenes. As sexciting as that is, it simply was not true.
I was inspired to do this episode thanks to this week's spotlight on Madonna in the podcast You Must Remember This. Host Karina Longworth even gave Mr. Skin a brief shoutout this week! How exciting!
