It’s interesting to hear an audience’s reaction to naked people onscreen. Kate Winslet’s Hanna in The Reader begins to undress her newfound captive Michael, and then dares to stand behind him naked, and the audience gasped. Dr. Manhattan reveals his blue penis in Watchmen, and many (guys) laughed. When Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk and James Franco’s Scott Smith passionately made out, the audience watched mostly 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 nude male bodies together to acclimate viewers to homosexual intimacy far more successfully than more mainstream-minded gay-themed films such as 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 like me)” – and the film contained scarcely any nudity. But in Milk, the audience more easily identifies with the characters onscreen. These scenes are tender, funny, romantic, playful. 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 these three films.

The Reader
(Warning: here be spoilers. If you want to skip the spoilers, go ahead to the Watchmen section)

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.

By the end of the film, Michael is as emotionally controlled as Hanna – and he regrets it. Hanna’s end helps Michael to awaken to the choked relationship he has with his own daughter, and he begins the process of emotional revelation by taking her to Hanna’s grave. He begins the return to his former self.

Watchmen
Dr. Manhattan’s nudity in Zach Snyder’s Watchmen conveys several ideas. First, it reiterates Manhattan’s lack of concern about human mores. Members of the audience laugh because there’s a huge naked blue dude onscreen, but depicting Manhattan as consistently naked also reinforces just how much he doesn’t fit into humanity. Yet ironically, his near-constant nudity (except when he meets the President, or attends a funeral or fights a war) also highlights precisely how human he is. He’s a well-built guy, almost a perfect physical specimen, and through constantly being confronted by his physique, the audience remembers see how human he is – even though he’s colored blue. He is a living oxymoron: extremely human, yet eerily not.

But Dr. Manhattan isn’t the only naked character in Watchmen. The entire film continually emphasizes how people can become a shadow of their former selves; it’s incidental that the main people we focus on in the film are former superheroes. They’ve all lost a part of themselves because the society they live in no longer wants them, even though that same society still needs them.

So, when Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II make out for the first time, and Nite Owl can’t function sexually, it’s funny. This loser finally gets the object of his lust and love, and then he can’t perform. Only later, after they’ve saved some people while in costume, can he function. They strip, but they strip off their costumes – not their daily-living clothes.

In one telling dream, Dan (Nite Owl) envisions himself and Laurie (Silk Spectre II) standing naked face to face. They unzip their skins to reveal themselves in full crime-fighting costumes. They kiss as a nuclear bomb explodes and destroys them. Dan wakes in a sweat, and stands naked (also another point where many guys in the audience laughed) in front of his Nite Owl costume, where he reveals his mixed emotions about being a masked avenger and the tentative future. His nudity is a sign of his newfound vulnerability.

Laurie and Dan get naked for the second time because they’re finally regaining some of their former sense of identity. This nakedness is regenerative, and is completely unlike Manhattan’s nudity, which sterilizes his body in the minds of those who encounter him. This is exactly why Laurie can’t stand Manhattan any longer: his exterior and his interior match in a way that she is unwilling to accept. She wants Dan, instead, who is passionate, daring, and involved underneath both his everyday mask and his superhero mask.

Nudity in the Conversation
But how do these films’ uses of nudity relate to or rephrase the already-existing conversation about nudity in film, and art, in general?

Nudity in art can challenge cultural assumptions and objectifications. Consider the audience’s reaction to Gustave Caillebotte’s Man at His Bath (1884). Initially, Caillebotte had to show it in a back room, rather than with the other Impressionists, because its subject matter shocked viewers. The painting frankly and viscerally depicts a rear view of a nude man drying off beside a tub, along with a few wet footprints, a pile of clothes, and closed curtains.

Through depicting the nude man, Caillebotte forced (and still forces) his audience to reconsider the male body as beautiful as the female. His painter compatriots focused the majority of their attention on nude women, and in presenting Man at His Bath, Caillebotte says, “Hey, men are equally as beautiful, fragile, and noticeable as women.”

Similarly, both Van Sant and Daldry seem to be reminding us through their depiction of nude men that men, too, are beautiful. Furthermore, Daldry shows both the male and the female body equally, and embodies, through his film, this concept of equal beauty.

He’s not objectifying beautiful bodies, but using them to make statements only available to be made through the use of nudity. In fact, each of these three directors is using nudity in film specifically to contribute their own statements about naked bodies in art.

One of film’s primary tools is a narrative told over time, and it lives closely to our everyday sense of external reality. By contrast, paintings – in which nudity has long dwelt – generally depict static moments or states, as do photographs, sculptures, and most other visual forms of art.

Therefore, film as an artistic medium carries a degree of responsibility. Onscreen nudity is often something prurient – and sadly, in the United States, most nudity on film (or television) serves little purpose other than stimulation and shameless marketing. The scantily-clad person strolls across the screen and the viewer starts to salivate. And maybe buys the product. The end.

In great (lasting, challenging, beautiful, truthful, skillful) art – great film, great painting, great quilting, great photography – prurience has little place. However, nudity for a great filmmaker relates to film’s sense of time: it focuses on the impermanence of the body, while at the same time reveling in the beauty of the same body, as in each of these films.

Harvey Milk’s body, Hanna’s body, Dr. Manhattan’s body: each fades away, and becomes dead through the course of the films. As in a portrait, these characters’ onscreen nude flesh preserves their image beyond death. It reminds the viewer of his or her own impermanence.

After nearly ten years as a New Yorker, and having worked in the entertainment and prestige beauty industries before entering the arts world where I now reside, I have learned that there is no point in trying to predict what will happen to me each day – whom I will meet, where I will end up, or what I will see. A couple weeks ago I met my friend for Vietnamese food in Chinatown, where, over sour vegetable soup and two pots of tea, we talked at length about the intersection of art and social justice. This friend, a sculptor, is deeply devoted to helping humanity’s most needy, and this devotion is born out of an intense closeness with God and healthy sense of mysticism that enables her to see angels where the rest of us might only see mere men.

After dinner, we headed to Chelsea to attend the opening reception for Traffik, an exhibition by fashion photographer Norman Jean Roy at MILK Gallery, open to the public November 21 through December 8. MILK, located at 450 W. 15^th Street, is considered to be New York City’s most prestigious photography gallery, and Roy is one of the most prominent high fashion photogs, under contract with Conde Nast to shoot exclusively for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Men’s Vogue, Allure, and Glamour.

With a resume like that, it’s no wonder that as we neared the gallery, we felt like we had walked onto the set of Entourage. Entering MILK and passing the hefty team of security guards, we were immediately swept into 6,000 square feet of models, agents, creative directors, managers, editors, and other photographers. The walls were hung with nearly fifty images, approximately four feet by five feet each. They were portraits of Cambodian prostitutes and other victims of the sex trafficking industry. The images were beautifully shot and the small placards posted beside each one gave a brief history of each subject featured. For anyone interested in the plight of victims of sex slavery, it would seem that this was a very important exhibition to attend.

However, the evening left both my friend and me deeply unsettled, because walking into the gallery, we entered what looked and felt, for all intents and purposes, like a house party. Club music was pumping, with a bass boost that reverberated through our ear canals and pulsated through our bones. The several hundred people bumping into one another throughout the huge room were talking so loudly that I could not hear my own words, and, from all appearances, very few of the people present were engaged with the art.

Interestingly, this was my second event dealing with sex trafficking in the past few weeks. On November 6, International Arts Movement hosted a screening of the film Branded, a documentary about the sex slave industry in Phoenix, Arizona. Following the film, I moderated a panel discussion with the filmmaker, Chad De Miguel, and a representative from Food for the Hungry, a non-profit organization committed to rescuing victims of the sex industry. I was surprised at the show when a woman came up to me and shouted through the noise, “You’re from International Arts Movement, right?” Trying to place her face (and failing), she quickly rescued me by explaining that she had attended the Branded screening, and I finally recalled meeting her briefly that night.

She works full time for a non-profit that is devoted to helping put an end to sex trafficking, and we tried to engage in meaningful conversation, but the atmosphere made it virtually impossible. I was yelling at the top of my lungs, and still couldn’t hear myself, or her. We exchanged cards and agreed to meet sometime in the future to discuss how IAM and her organization might partner together.

As I made my way around the outside parameters of the room, reading the placards and studying the artwork, I was increasingly ill at ease with the scene I was smack dab in the center of. As I watched people laughing and mingling and networking and scanning the room for who was there, eager to see and be seen, the paradox before me became increasingly obscene. I felt like I was looking at a room full of sex industry workers surrounded by images of sex industry workers; both the industry represented in the flesh, and the industry represented on film used sex to sell their wares.

At one point I pulled out a pen and began making notes about what I was experiencing. Shortly after I had started writing, a man with shoulder-length blond hair bee-lined for me, a full glass of white wine sloshing around in his hand. I didn’t need to hear his slurred speech to know he was drunk; his red eyes and dopey smile spoke volumes. “What’cha writin’?” he asked in a singsong manner, which was creepy coming from a man who appeared to be approximately fifty years old. I stared down at him and managed to dodge him for a bit, but quickly became the unwitting audience to his editorial of the event. “We can’t look at this from an American perspective, with an American standard,” he blathered. “These girls . . . what else do they have? This is all they have. We shouldn’t judge them. This is all they know. This is their life. They’re not asking to be anything other than what they are.”

I was dumbfounded. Was he serious? I’m afraid he was. I contemplated trying to reason with him, trying to somehow get past the incomprehensible ignorance of one who could stand in front of a picture of a woman with deep scars all over her body and filthy, infected lesions on her feet, who barely earned her living by servicing men sexually, and think this way. But I was not up to shouting, and I knew that nothing I could say would make any difference. As I excused myself and walked away, he said something about the self-righteousness of expecting people in other countries to live up to our American standards. I actually did say something to him about them not being “American” standards, but rather basic humanity standards, but he dismissed me.

With the paradoxical scenario of serious subject matter and a party-like atmosphere, I was very curious about the background of this exhibition. According to the press materials I managed to procure, the project came about when Norman Jean Roy was on assignment for Glamour‘s “Women of the Year” portfolio. Roy was introduced to Somaly Mam, a former Cambodian sex slave who was being honored for her work rescuing women trapped in the sex industry and helping them reintegrate into society. Overwhelmed by her story and haunted by the faces of the women Mam had worked with, Roy decided to spearhead a project that would expose and elevate the grave reality and gross injustice of their experiences.

So last January, Roy returned to Cambodia to photograph the victims, gaining access to brothels with the help of Mam and her organization, AFESIP. He was able to observe and document the harrowing lives of working adolescent and child prostitutes, as well as those who have been rescued and are now in rehab at AFESIP centers. The book that resulted, which was the center of last night’s exhibition, was Traffik, which captures the powerful stories of young women who were beaten, starved, raped and tortured as sex slaves. Several of the women talked about being sold by their mothers and being raped as children as early as age four.

As I watched the professionals in one sex industry mingling and drinking wine while being surrounded by larger than life sized images of professionals in another sex industry, the pungent odor of sick irony filled my nostrils, and I wanted to scream. The very publications that use sex to sell their wares were, I guess, ostensibly mourning for victims, half a world away in a physical sense, yet in a totally different universe in the social sense.

Except they weren’t mourning. Honestly, it would have been a very noble scene if they had been. High-profile fashion and beauty professionals in a prestigious New York gallery, stepping out of their party-hopping and schmoozing for one night to examine the horrors of sex slavery? It would have brought a tear to my eye – seriously.

But, from what I could tell, a relative few people were even looking at the images, let alone showing any sort of deep emotional reaction to it. And while the images are very well shot and are effective in capturing the essence of prostitution in the impoverished developing world, set in the context of loud music and a well-stocked open bar, something just felt icky. One image was particularly disturbing in light of the environment we were in. A young girl was dressed in sexy shiny panties and grown-up jewelry, lifting her shirt and looking at the camera with an almost seductive expression that was totally incomprehensible in light of the fact that she could not have been older than four. She was labeled as a child of a prostitute, but it was not much of a stretch to imagine her entertaining clients herself. At the very least, she had to have observed the business her mother was in. The image might have been simply a snapshot of a little girl playing dress up, except that she was living in a brothel, where, according to the press materials available, men pay more for sex with girls between four and seven years old, believing them to be less likely to carry STD’s. (They are, unfortunately, mistaken in that assumption).

Yet, in the milieu of pulsating club music and a plentiful supply of wine and liquor, I wondered at whether there might be people in the room with pedophiliac tendencies who, rather than being correctly horrified by it, would instead be turned on. The music, which was fine by itself, and the wine, which I appreciate regularly, simply did not belong together with images of four-year-olds dressed in sexy lingerie. For everything there is a season – a time to dance, and a time to mourn. But when people are (figuratively) dancing in the midst of such a painful exhibit, it becomes almost a mockery of the tragedy.

When IAM screened Branded, we were very mindful about the context in which the film was shown. We sold no concessions that evening. No wine, no beer, no popcorn. Our intent was that, from the time people entered the space to the time they left, we would foster an environment of concern and soberness about the issue at hand. We hoped that the film would inform our audience, inspiring them to leave the space and look for ways to engage with the issue of sex trafficking, to help change the destiny of the victims and create the world that ought to be. Indeed, there is a time to dance, and Space 38|39 has seen plenty of playful reverie. But when it’s time to mourn, it’s time to mourn.

Unfortunately, this was not the case at the opening reception for Traffik. The project is important, and I hope people will attend the exhibition, buy the coffee table book (whose proceeds will benefit Somaly Mam’s Foundation) and leave more informed about this blight on humanity. Norman Jean Roy’s work in this project is excellent, and I applaud his use of his talent and opportunity to bring this awful situation to light.

However, I am not hopeful that many people at last week’s reception – people of great means and influence who, if engaged, could make a world of difference – will. People who actually hear a call for action are more likely to respond by doing something about it. Unfortunately, it was hard to hear anything above the roar of the electronica that blared through MILK that night.