Entertainment Industry: Never Enough Nudity and Sex

The television series ‘Idol’, produced by HBO, was supposed to deliver a strong blow to the American entertainment industry and expose its dark secrets, particularly the sexualization and exploitation of young pop singers and all those who dream of becoming famous one day. However, the first and, seemingly, only five episodes had a completely opposite effect, partly due to (with some exceptions) unconvincing and ‘overripe’ acting, led by Abel Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd, a music star and one of the creators, but even more so because the story was overshadowed by brutal critiques accusing ‘Idol’ of ‘sadistic pornography’ and ‘sexualizing mental illness’.

The most such complaints were directed at director Sam Levinson, whose rejected version of the script allegedly contained disturbing scenes of beatings and rape. Levinson has faced similar accusations before, during the very successful ‘Euphoria’, when it was widely reported that he forced actresses to shoot completely unnecessary nude scenes. Thanks to all of the above, the question of whether there is too much sex and nudity on television today has resurfaced, perhaps more than ever. Those who believe that this is indeed the case can, for example, present a list compiled by journalists from The Sun a little over two years ago, calculating the number of sexual scenes in Netflix hits. At the top was the series ‘Orange Is the New Black’ with 44 such scenes, although spread over seven seasons. The same company is also responsible for ‘Fragile Beauties’, a drama that was immediately criticized by moralists after the first episode aired for ‘outrageously unnecessary sex scenes’, primarily because the main characters are teenagers.

Some Good Years

This work, based on the novel by Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton, along with the aforementioned ‘Euphoria’, vividly illustrates how much freer and more explicit television is today when it comes to nudity, especially when compared to teenage phenomena from the 1990s such as ‘Beverly Hills 90210’ or the somewhat more realistic ‘And That’s My Life’. A good example is the legendary ‘Twin Peaks’ by David Lynch, a series that is rightly credited with revolutionizing television and heralding its entry into the new millennium. The first two seasons, aired in 1990 and 1991, were complex, occasionally frightening, and artistically inclined from start to finish, but to see the first naked person, one had to wait until 2017, when Lynch’s classic finally returned in full glory.

When it comes to nude scenes on the small screen, ‘Sex and the City’ played a much more important role, a comedy series in which all the main actresses, except for Sarah Jessica Parker, appeared at least topless on several occasions, and Kim Cattrall became a true sex symbol even as she approached fifty. The new episodes, titled ‘And Just Like That…’, strive to keep up with the times and the ubiquitous woke trend, so Miranda is in a relationship with a non-binary person, which did not sit well with a good portion of fans.

A Strict Finger of Correctness

At the same time, today’s (especially American) television is often under fire from those who believe it has become too, almost unbearably, politically correct, with which it is also not hard to agree. Humor seems to be almost vaccinated against anything that might offend someone, and the culture of cancellation has spread even to the distant past, prompting initiatives to, for example, ban further airing of the legendary episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’ in which John Cleese brutally insults and mocks a group of German guests after suffering a brain injury (although that same episode is extremely popular in Germany).

Around that time, ‘Saturday Night Live‘ aired a controversial sketch in its premiere season in which Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor exchanged the worst insults regarding whites and blacks. The very thought that we could see something like that on television today borders on science fiction.

Where Has the Film Gone

If there is currently too much nudity on television, on the big screen, at least on the one showing the latest Hollywood productions, it has almost completely disappeared. The reason, however, does not lie in some concession to more conservative currents in American society, but in the complete dominance of blockbusters based on Marvel and DC comics, which has reached such proportions that it often seems there is nothing else in cinemas. It is possible, to be fair, to find exceptions like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’, but that film, along with its two sequels, was so panned by critics that at one point the entire genre was threatened to become a subject of ridicule.

A similar fate befell the second installment of ‘Basic Instinct’, a crime film that owes its fame primarily to explicit scenes, especially the one in which Sharon Stone is interrogated at the police station. The incredible success of that work by Paul Verhoeven in the 1990s triggered a real avalanche of often disastrous erotic thrillers in which important roles were sometimes played by porn actors, thus raising the level of controversy and attracting media attention.

Despite this, it is quite likely that none of those films, nor any of their more recent successors, will become part of American cultural heritage as was the case with ‘Midnight Cowboy’, the only title with an X rating to win an Oscar, ‘Straw Dogs’, or ‘Deliverance’ by John Boorman with its shocking depiction of same-sex rape of one of the characters.

We must not forget ‘Taxi Driver’ in which Jodie Foster won the Academy Award for her role as a fourteen-year-old prostitute. Such a film could not be made today in Hollywood’s A-production, but something relatively similar was received in the form of the series ‘The Deuce’, which dramatized the Sodom and Gomorrah of that part of New York in the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly the birth of the American porn industry.

Wrapped in Attitude

If, however, we shift the focus to Europe, we will encounter distinctive authors like Gaspar Noé or Lars von Trier, but their works such as ‘Irreversible’, ‘Nymphomaniac’, and ‘The House That Jack Built’ use sex and nudity to provoke outrage, perhaps even more than as an integral part of the plot. Finally, it is worth recalling a long-ago story, now about forty years old, related to Eddie Murphy and the big hit ‘Beverly Hills Cop’. The success of that film was something its creators wanted to capitalize on for television, so they came up with the idea of turning the adventures of the hilariously funny Axel Foley into a comedy series.

However, Murphy did not want to hear about it because he was convinced that he would have to significantly tone down the jokes and antics of the main character on the small screens, and it was quite possible that he would also have to cut out all scenes involving nudity and more realistically depicted violence. After everything written in this text, he would very likely do the complete opposite today and wholeheartedly accept the offer to become the star of a sitcom – and thus nothing of the aforementioned would need to be toned down or cut out.

Nudity in Yugoslav Film and After

Since the second half of the 1960s, Yugoslav cinema has been abundant with nudity and sex. Dušan Makavejev already questioned the relationship between communism and sexuality in his banned film ‘W.R. – Mysteries of the Organism’ in 1971, and in the following decade, even comedies like ‘Žikina Dinastija’ were full of naked actresses and quite crude sexual scenes. After the breakup of the former state, Croatian film sought in every way to distance itself from that tradition, so even characters like dealers or killers spoke in a literary and stiff manner, while seeing a naked body became something unimaginable, even though the action, as in ‘Russian Meat’ by Lukas Nola, mostly took place in a brothel. Things gradually returned to normal, but we are still behind the Serbs in this regard, who in recent years have produced ‘A Serbian Film’, ‘Life and Death of a Porno Gang’, and ‘Clip’, which are rightly categorized as pornographic.