Nudity, Vanity Fair, and so forth

[womzilla]

This month's Vanity Fair has a remarkable cover, in which Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson manage to be both nude and astonishingly unattractive.

VF contributor James Wolcott points towards a two-part essay by Lance Mannion on nudity and actresses (and actors) that is one of the sanest discussions of how nudity works and doesn't work in film. Go read part 1 (Because I can't resist the temptation to write about pretty young actresses getting naked) and if you like it, follow the link at the top of the page to part 2 (More naked actresses---because February is sweeps month).

Mannion's commentary is easily the best thing I've read about the subject of sex in art since Neil Gaiman's introduction to a volume of The Complete "Omaha", The Cat Dancer, which included this reaction:

[It is] simply a story in which the virtual cameras continue to roll while people take their clothes off and make love (just as they do in the world you and I inhabit) -- delineated with an unblinking charm which has the odd effect (for me, at least) of making one wonder where all the sex has gone in the other fictions one reads or hears or sees. . .

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

...in which Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson manage to be both nude and astonishingly unattractive.

And almost unrecognizable.

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

"Me, too."

It's unclear why the photographer and the magazine think that such startlingly attractive ingenues need ugly hair, bad makeup, and excessive photo-retouching. Why not just let au naturel be au naturel?