LA Times TV critic Mary McNamara explains why it is time for HBO to stop with the tits already in what I gather is a piece for this Sunday's Calender, available online at:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-ca-hbo-breasts-20110703,0,6762922.story This is an articulate expression of growing sentiment I have seen expressed in recent months, both online and in face to face conversations, mostly since Game of Thrones. I am surprised that there is a lot in it that I agree with (surprised because, like Kramer in that Seinfeld episode with the naked woman traipsing around in the apartment across the street, few heterosexual American men can really bring themselves to call for less female nudity on their television sets). Still, there was much I did not agree with. I don't agree that upper body female frontal nudity is always, or even mostly, gratuitous and exploitative (that she calls "tits", as opposed to the artistic depiction of boobs, as in the final scene of the season-ending episode of Thrones, which McNamara, with some justification, calls the "the best use of female nudity on television ever") on HBO. I am currently re-watching the complete series of The Sopranos, and have been confirmed in my judgement that the mostly plastic "tits" at the Bing are almost always an essential marker of the underlying limited humanity of Tony and his boys, and almost never really used for erotic titillation. The nudity in the various sex scenes most of the time come closer to McNamara's breasts than tits (in a variation of what Paul Newman once famously said about the "The Player" - they are the kinds of scenes where we usually don't see the tits of the women we want to see, but mostly the tits of the women we don't want). Ditto the use of boobs in Deadwood. I thought Rome was a bit titty excessive (I only saw the first season of that), but unlike McNamara, I think their use in Boardwalk Empire was mostly justified. I have not seen the HBO vampire show, I hear there are a lot of tits in that. But Thrones does seem to have set a new level for gratuitous tit shots. There were a couple of much discussed scenes where the boobs seemed to be thrown in merely to keep the audience from flipping during extended periods of plot exposition by one of the main characters. Again, unlike Ms. McNamara I am not automatically offended by the use of naked female breasts - I have found it possible to appreciate the beauty of the female form (okay, lust after hot babes) while also respecting women for their intelligence, humor and abilities. But a few years after my age stopped ending in the word "teen" I stopped being interested primarily in the sight of strange female breasts (though a certain interest remains), like most (well, many) grown men who have seen a few real breasts of real women. The use of tits on Thrones had the effect on me of undermining what in most other respects was a successful attempt to tell a fantasy saga that grown-ups could enjoy. But those long titty scenes threatened to reduce the show to the the its genre spawn in the sweaty daydreams of 15 year old boy virgins. Unlike McNamara, whose article had the pungent aroma of hyper-feminist puritanism, I would like to see Thrones, and maybe HBO in general, give more thought to its use of nudity and sexuality, not to focus on de-sexualized depictions of breasts as in the dragon mother scene, but a more mature, and effective inclusion of sexuality and eroticism in its dramas. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
