I’ve avoided writing about Danish director Lars von Trier’s
upcoming arthouse movie epic Nymphomaniac
for two reasons: one, such blatant titillation is boring, and two, I didn’t
want to give publicity to a film I feel certain will be a degrading experience.
But the recent
revelation that actor Shia LaBeouf secured his role in the movie partly
because he sent pictures of his penis to the filmmakers has compelled me to
comment.
If you’re not familiar with von Trier, he’s the provocateur
behind such disturbing flicks as Dancer
in the Dark, Antichrist, Dogville, and now the sexually explicit Nymphomaniac – which, as the title
suggests, isn’t exactly a Disney movie, and which is notable mostly for its
unusually creepy
marketing campaign consisting of posters of the actors in mid-orgasm. If
you have ever found yourself wondering what The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo bad guy Stellan Skarsgaard looks like during
sexual climax, well, now you know. As Midwestern storyteller Garrison Keillor
once put it, “If it feels good, it probably doesn’t look good.”
I’m not sure why anyone would rush to cinemas to see Shia LaBeouf
in full frontal nudity and having onscreen sex, but apparently von Trier thinks
he will be a draw for the audience. Mack Rawden at Cinemablend exposed, if
you’ll pardon the pun, some eyebrow-raising news about the casting process for LaBeouf,
which entailed him emailing producers a picture of his penis. As LaBeouf himself
explains in this video
interview:
I'll never forget this because my
entire team reacted with such a fear, you know? The first request on the
production end, not from Lars, but from production, was pictures of my penis…
Lars goes, “All right... Send him
the (offer) letter.” The letter was, “Are you game?” And so I guess the first
test was, “Let's time how long it takes this mother****er to send his dick over
the Internet.” It was like 20 minutes. So they were like, “All right, (the)
kid’s ready.”
Ready for the challenge? Or just willing to debase himself? The
best actors and actresses have a courageous capacity for exposing themselves
emotionally; but as much as ones like LaBeouf believe that it shows serious
commitment to their craft, exposing themselves physically is irrelevant and unnecessary. And sharing genitalia
selfies with the producers at their demand merely reveals a willingness to humiliate
yourself for the gig.
Rawden, on the other hand, finds it admirable: “[I]n an age
where everyone is so f***ing politically correct and unwilling to go out on a
limb, [LaBeouf’s] character trait is actually kind of refreshing.” I wouldn’t
call it refreshing so much as depressing, not only for what it says about
LaBeouf (and it’s not my intention to single him out; for all I know, his
fellow Nymphomaniac actors also
submitted to this demeaning casting process), but about the filmmakers and people
like Rawden, all of whom seem to believe that LaBeouf’s compliance with this
request constitutes artistic courage.
This isn’t the space to solve the whole “is it art or
pornography?” debate, particularly without having seen von Trier’s film (and I
don’t plan to – I don’t want to see any more of Christian Slater and Willem
Dafoe than I already can in their posters). But this revelation about LaBeouf
and Nymphomaniac reminds me of a comic
short film called, “It’s
Not Porn – It’s HBO” (NSFW language), in which actors and actresses are depicted
being congratulated and respected for getting roles in what would otherwise be
considered porn films – except that they’re for HBO, which somehow legitimizes
them.
The entertainment world has
been pushing the envelope of taste so far for so long that it’s time for it to
come full circle. Nudity and onscreen sex are almost always gratuitous*, boring
and predictable – and most unforgivably, they take the audience out of the
story. You know what would be artistically “edgy” and courageous now?
Restraint. Subtlety. Imagination. Drawing a line. Personal dignity. It doesn’t
take courage to play into Hollywood’s morally vacant compulsion to push sexual boundaries;
it takes courage to refuse to.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 1/15/14)
