![]() ![]() What we have gotten in the last decade, in a way in keeping with Bacon’s mock PSA plea, has been an attempt to make men objects rather than sole subjects of desire. “And by bacon, of course,” he clarified, “I mean your weiner, your balls and your butt.” Back in 2015 Kevin Bacon urged his fellow actors to #FreeTheBacon. This has been a corrective to decades of women being objectified by camera, characters, and audiences alike. Not intent on just parading dicks for our titillating pleasure or uncritically offering up scenes of sexual assault where male bodies command power by their mere presence, Euphoria asks us to question why it is that male full frontal nudity continues to so rattle and excite us.įor the past decade on television we’ve had role reversals that find powerful female characters lustfully assessing male characters’ naked bodies. But Euphoria encourages us to reassess how the naked male body has been deployed within storylines about sexual abuse centered on dangerous men. Recent depictions of male full frontal nudity on TV on shows like FX’s American Gods and Netflix’s Easy - both of which showed erect penises no less - have tried to offset the male gaze that has long defined and controlled what kinds of naked bodies are meant to be seen (and lusted after) on the small screen. Euphoria is a perfect example - and a fascinating deconstruction - of this storied history, wherein the small screen’s recent obsession with depicting toxic masculinity has coincided with paradigm-shifting moments of onscreen male nudity. But mostly this is because, over the years, audiences have been trained to expect such a sight only within the most violent of contexts. This is partly because of its continued novelty cisgender male actors so seldom drop trou that when they do, the impact of said scenes is unintentionally excessive. Its central guiding metaphor, as its title suggests, may be the pleasures and perils of drugs, but Euphoria is just as interested in frank depictions and discussions of its characters’ sex lives.īut on American television, even in 2019, full frontal male nudity - especially the kind that Euphoria so brazenly portrays - still feels like an affront. Priding itself on frankly depicting these various issues, the show manages to make provocative television that skirts (and at times treads over) the line of propriety. ![]() ![]() Slowly introducing us to her various classmates (and their idiosyncratic histories, sexual and otherwise), Rue offers us a glimpse into a world where dick pics, sex tapes, stolen opioids, underage sex, and cam sessions are a quotidian part of the 21st-century high school experience. (And write-ups of the show were happy to harp on the drama’s provocativeness, noting the presence of “ close to 30 penises” in one scene.) Euphoria is narrated by Rue Bennett (Zendaya), a 17-year-old who recently overdosed and is just returning home after a stint in rehab. Many scenes in Sam Levinson’s Euphoria, which premiered on June 16, seem intent on shocking its viewers. Beyond the rarity of this image, there is a lot of weighted cultural baggage in this blurry shot of Dane’s (prosthetic) dick. The frame keeps Jules in focus, allowing the full frontal nudity in front of us to remain in soft focus. ![]() The dreamy eeriness of the moment makes the shot that follows all the more jarring: As Jules (just in her underwear) remains seated on the bed in the background, we see the man putting a condom on his hardened penis. Remaining standing, his face obscured by the camera’s framing, he begins to push his fingers into her mouth, asking her to open wider. As he talks to her, the camera focuses on her face. Stoic about the soulless life he leads in this small town, the unnamed older man (Cal, we later learn, played by Eric Dane) takes pleasure in ordering around the young nubile girl with pink-tinged long blonde hair. A young girl named Jules (played by trans actor Hunter Schafer) giddily shows up to meet an older man she’d first contacted online. There’s a scene in the pilot episode of HBO’s Euphoria that is, pun intended, hard to shake off. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |