2000 CONFESSIONS
December
November
October
September
July/August
June
May
April
March
February
January

Little Notes
Letters

Talk About Movies
Roamin' Catholic
Follow Me




Contents © 2000
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

MARCH 2000 CONFESSIONS

WHAT'S EMBARRASSING

One of the great problems of onscreen nudity -- particularly female nudity -- is its power to remove the viewer -- particularly the male viewer -- from the story being told, to narrow his vision and understanding to the point where it's just him and a naked woman. One hears of nudity being "necessary to the story," when in many cases, it is necessary to avoid nudity if the story is to be preserved in the viewer's mind.

Once the man is left alone, so to speak, with the naked woman, the image may more easily become an occasion of sin, and we arrive at the obvious objection to nudity: the temptation to lust. But even when this scenario can be avoided -- and I do believe it can -- there is still the fact that she is naked and I am not. She is exposing herself -- albeit only her fleshy surface -- in a way that I am not, and the disproportion between viewer and viewed leaves me embarrassed. I know too much about her, and she knows nothing of me.

Julianne Moore, who stars with Ralph Fiennes in the current film adaptation of Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair, is naked in several rather intense adulterous sex scenes. She overcomes the first problem; I found myself drawn to think more about her effect on Fiennes and his effect on her than about her effect on me. But the second problem remains.

The first encounter -- for the viewer and for the illicit lovers -- produced the most discomfort in me, and I've been thinking about why that was. I actually arched my back and twisted in my seat, as if trying to flee the tableau onscreen. Some might think my especial discomfort odd, since the only exposed erogenous zone in the first encounter was Fiennes' bottom. But the scene's explicitness was of another kind: for one thing, the motions of intercourse were more clearly visible and more lengthily lingered over. And for another, there was the tremendously affecting shot of Fiennes' hand finding its way inside Moore's skirt and, we are led to believe, inside Moore herself.

By "affecting," I do not in any way mean arousing -- I do not think that all nudity is pornographic, and besides, the shot didn't actually involve nudity. Part of what I do mean is that it produced a sympathetic twinge in me, a response to his desire and her pleasure, the violent intensity of it. And because I was a witness and not a participant, I was embarrassed, the way I would be embarrassed if I knew my wife was thinking about shopping while I was in the throes of passion. In either case, there exists something of the disproportion I mentioned earlier.

In one way, that's what's embarrassing: not the sex, but the passion. (I suspect that this is why porn, which is all sex and no passion, is not embarrassing, just arousing.) It's a person in ecstasy -- "standing outside" themselves, utterly taken over. The overtaken soul is unrestrained, exposing its interior motions without any regard for the audience, and it's almost painful to behold. It's the same reason we feel the urge to turn away when people are overcome with grief.

But sex is not grief -- sex is more intimate, even perfectly intimate. So intimate that the partners can actually give themselves to each other physically, resulting in a fruit that shares aspects of both. It's a total exposure of the self.

Back in college, we often joked about "knowing someone in the Biblical sense," a reference to the Old Testament passage, "... went in and knew his wife." Calling carnal union a kind of knowing dovetailed nicely with the definition of knowledge commonly used at school -- the union of the intellect with the form of a thing. Sex is a kind of perfect knowing of a person. Seeing sex shares in this perfection -- seeing is also a kind of knowing. (Not for nothing do we speak of a penetrating intellect and a piercing gaze.) Moore's character hinted at this when she talked about God's perfect knowledge of her; she said, "He knew me the way [my lover's] hands knew me."

Besides being total, the exposure is immediate. All filmwatching involves disproportion between viewer and viewed -- we know the characters, are privy to their lives, while they know nothing of us. But the process is not immediate -- as in life, our knowledge of the person is gained piecemeal, through particulars. And there is the distance created by the simple fact that they are up there on the screen.

But when I see a woman having sex (and in this film, the woman is the one presented most graphically), instead of discovering her through these particulars -- seeing what she does, hearing what she says -- I am presented with her whole self, ecstatic and exposed. The disproportion is too great, the distance between us too small; it's unsettling. And in that first scene, I came closest to witnessing his actual penetration into her -- her body, but also herself. I think that's why it was the most disturbing.

TOP