IT’S INTERESTING to hear an audience’s reaction to naked people onscreen. When Hanna (Kate Winslet) began to undress her newfound captive in The Reader, and then dared to stand behind him naked, and the audience gasped. When Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) revealed his blue penis in Watchmen, many (guys, especially) laughed. When Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) and Scott Smith (James Franco) passionately kissed in Milk, the audience watched silently. Those reactions certainly depend on the audience, but they also reveal something about these films’ uses of nudity.

Milk

In Milk, director Gus Van Sant exposes two male bodies together to acclimate viewers to homosexual intimacy far more successfully than more mainstream-minded, gay-themed films like Brokeback Mountain and Philadelphia. Viewers of Brokeback Mountain could think, “These are two closeted guys having an affair, so they’re not like me.” The sexual content was generally rough, animalistic. Watching Philadelphia, viewers could think, “This guy’s dying of AIDS, so he’s not much like me.” And the film contained scarcely any nudity. But in Milk, tender, funny, playful romantic scenes make it easier to identify with the characters onscreen. Van Sant forces the viewer to empathize with, and thus, normalize, gay men acting out their sensuality and developing romance.

When portraying men being physically intimate and vulnerable, Van Sant is unashamed, but he also treats it as if he knows he’s pushing the boundaries, and realizes where the limit between tasteful and trashy exists. He knows that to gain acceptance, or even acknowledgement, you have to push, but not too hard. When characters in Milk are naked, they expose themselves emotionally. The physical parallels the emotional, and in this, also, Van Sant attempts to gain empathy and sympathy from the audience. When his characters are nude, their nudity functions the most conventionally—in the interest of relationship intimacy—of the three films mentioned here.

The Reader

In Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, the function of Hanna’s and Michael’s nudity develops over time. At first, Hanna controls Michael as she undresses him and brazenly exposes herself to him, which might partially explain why this nakedness is so shocking: a woman controls (and to some extent, exploits) a young boy. She acts as the prison guard in their relationship, not only as the older woman controlling the young man, but also as the one in the relationship who decides when they will have sex. She even gruffly scrubs his entire body in the bathtub, as she might have done with her former prisoners. But this nudity is also ironic. They are physically vulnerable to one another, but emotionally, they couldn’t be further apart.

Michael has a teenage crush on Hanna, yet Hanna remains closed off, unwilling to reveal anything emotional or spiritual about herself. Despite their nudity and sexual intimacy, she is an impenetrable wall, emotionally and psychologically. Yet over the course of their interaction, the nudity in their relationship comes to signify their gradual revelations of self.

As Hanna reveals more about herself, she seems to want to put on more clothes, and she’s less interested in being naked with Michael. The two separate, and Michael is left with memories of their physical intimacy. By the time he reaches adulthood, he has learned from Hanna the same ability to be physically intimate and emotionally absent. On the other hand, Michael begins the relationship by revealing himself entirely to Hanna. He’s embarrassed by his physical intimacy, but has no qualms about opening up to her emotionally. Later, he learns to be embarrassed about his feelings, yet jumps right out of his clothes and into bed. Hanna teaches him to unlearn his willingness toward emotional intimacy.