Nudity in a Movie: The Double Standard

Last night, I saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall and had a good time. However, as a guy, I thought I saw a little too much of Peter Bretter a little too often. In the movie, the only person that is ever fully naked is Peter Bretter. The only other nudity that occurs is a panning of a wall of pictures that shows girls flashing and a brief scene where the camera focuses on one particular picture that is supposed to be Mila Kunis. I hate to disappoint the guys out there, but the picture was not a real picture of Kunis, but rather a body double. Not that I know from personal experience, but she has said so in numerous interviews.

On a side note, it is interest to hear how Kunis described the process of picking out her body double.

“They sent pictures and emails to me of the women -- just boobs and no faces. I get to see their bodies and see what matched my figure the most and what kind of boobs I wanted to have. You go from, like, double D's to A's. It was every kind of boob you can imagine. I sat there with my friends and boyfriend and we looked at them like, "What kind of boobs do you think I should have. Maybe these ones or these ones..." And then I emailed back and said I like this boob and this boob and they ended up going with the boobs that I liked.”

So was this type of nudity okay? I am comfortable saying that saying a male’s full frontal nudity does not bother me, but I do think they went a little over the top with it. It went from shock factor to over the top quickly and while it was really only in the beginning and the end of the movie it never really left the back of my brain. Reading other reviews and speaking with friends, I think a consensus between both guys and girls has been that it was a little too much. But if the roles had been reversed and the movie had full frontal female nudity and only random male crotch shots, would that have been viewed in the same way? The answer is probably not. While some women may take offense to it, most guys would say it was the highlight of the movie.

This is what I call the double standard in Hollywood and this is one of the things that Judd Apatow, the movie’s producer, is trying to address with his movies. For those unfamiliar with Apatow’s name, he has recently had a string of hits including, Superbad, Knocked Up, and The 40 Year Old Virgin. I am not making this up. Apatow has admitted on numerous occasions that it is his personal mission to increase the amount of male nudity in movies, so the double standard is no longer applicable. In fact, he stated in a World Entertainment News Service story that “I’m gonna get a penis in every movie I do from now on.” If you think about it, there are not really that many movies that include full frontal male nudity. Apatow has a long way of breaking the double standard, but in doing so, he needs to ensure that he does not isolate his audience by trying too hard to break it to quickly. To that end, Russell Brand, who plays the new guy in Bretter’s character’s life, has said that if he knew how much full frontal nudity was going to be in the movie, then he would not have been in the movie. This seemed ironic to me, because his character is a musical star who is also a sex maniac. But nonetheless, Apatow has a fine line to walk to ensure that he is moving movie watchers and actors in his direction, rather than having them turn away.