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By Stephanie Zacharek

April 26, 1999 | There's a moment in François Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player" when a young woman has slipped out of her clothes and into bed, gearing up to make love. We've already seen her breasts, but her partner reaches over and pulls the sheet modestly around them, saying mischievously, "That's the way it is in the movies, exactly like that."

It must have been such a funny little jibe in 1960, in a French movie (and everyone knew how racy those foreign films could be) made by a director enamored of American movie tradition. But what's surprising about the joke is that almost 40 years later, it's more apt than ever.

Supposedly there's more sex, and more nudity, in the movies today than ever before. But if there is, where is it? It's everywhere, if you listen to people at the extreme end of the spectrum, including fundamentalists and other stay-at-home cultural know-it-alls who think they know the content of most contemporary movies even though they actually go to very few. But even longtime serious moviegoers may not have thought much about the way sex is dealt with in contemporary movies, compared with the latitude filmmakers had in the late '60s and '70s. Concerned parents are often troubled by a vague sense of dread about the culture in general, but they don't always see a wide enough spectrum of movies to know exactly how sex is currently dealt with -- or, more frequently, not dealt with.

The issue of nudity in the movies also comes loaded with baggage left over from feminist attitudes of the '60s and '70s; some women would still argue that every woman who appears nude in a movie is being objectified. And others -- like the Boston Phoenix columnist who wrote an open letter to Susan Sarandon after "White Palace" came out, denouncing her for looking so good and giving such a great on-screen blow job that she only made the rest of us feel bad -- use movies as lightning rods for their own insecurities. It's convenient to denounce beautiful actresses, especially naked ones, as the natural enemy of womankind's self-esteem. But would it be preferable to have a culture geared toward not hurting our feelings? What's more, the women who feel most threatened may not have thought about all the ramifications that restricted nudity in the movies -- or excessively Puritan attitudes toward it -- could have on the art form in general.

The truth is that nudity is more of a dirty word in Hollywood than ever before. Starting with the advent of AIDS in the early 1980s, Hollywood's attitudes toward sex in the movies have become increasingly constricted; sex is rarely dealt with as frankly or with as much freewheeling ease as it was in the movies of the '70s. And anyone who's followed the movie industry with even half an eye open over the past 10 years or so knows that the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board is almost completely intolerant of sex. The release of James Toback's 1998 "Two Girls and a Guy" was held up while Toback battled the ratings board over a love scene that it said would earn the film an NC-17 rating; the board accepted the scene after Toback ended up making a few barely perceptible cuts, but the episode is indicative of how hard the MPAA is willing to dig its heels in when it comes to issues of sex.

There are probably plenty of people who simply say, So what? Who cares if there are fewer exposed body parts to look at in the movie theaters, especially in an age when too much casual sex in real life is liable to kill you? Maybe we've circled back to a time when all we need are symbols and suggestions -- a lingering fade to black, for example, to suggest that a couple are about to embark on a night of mad, passionate sex, like we used to get in '30s comedies. (There's something distressingly backward, though, about making a conscious choice to handle sexual content this way simply out of cowardice -- rather than out of necessity, as was the case with moviemakers in the '30s.) And there's some truth to the notion that naked skin isn't necessarily erotic by itself -- you really don't have to see everything in order to get turned on.

But the moviegoing climate in America today smacks a little too much of prudery, prissiness and, above all, fear. Nudity is handled much more gracefully and naturally in European movies, and is accepted much more casually by audiences. For an actor or actress, it's simply part of what goes with playing a role: Samantha Morton's nudity in the superb 1998 English film "Under the Skin" is so essential to the character's situation that it's anything but shocking. The nudity we see in contemporary American movies is often so carefully and artfully shot -- with sheets and blankets fastidiously arranged just so, lest we catch a forbidden glimpse of a breast or a penis -- that sometimes it barely registers. There's so much calculation to it that it ends up having no meaning.

If female moviegoers are the ones who are made to feel uncomfortable at the sight of a naked actress on-screen, they should also consider that cultivating a climate in which women's bodies are kept under wraps, revealed chastely and tastefully or not at all, isn't the answer to making them feel better -- if anything, it's only likely to make them feel more objectified. Mainstream American movies that deal with women's sensuality (or anybody's sensuality) in any significant way are rare, and the ones that do are either brutally misunderstood by audiences, slapped with an NC-17 rating or both -- as was the case with Philip Kaufman's 1990 "Henry and June." The more strictures placed on filmmakers and the actors they work with -- either by the ratings board, by the studios who are cowed by it or, more indirectly, by audiences -- the smaller their window for portraying experiences that actually reflect our own.

The vast majority of established actresses will not do nude scenes, presumably out of fear that they won't be taken seriously as practitioners of their craft. You can hardly blame them, given the fact that there's a nation of moviegoers out there -- many of them women -- who believe that ambitious young actresses will do anything, including take all their clothes off, just to get attention. While it's true that there's no shortage of actresses in revealing clothing on the magazine stands, it's hardly fair that the amount of skin they're willing to expose should be so readily held against them, regardless of their talent.

Actresses can be as judgmental about their peers as anyone. "I see these young women who are so overtly sexual," says Reese Witherspoon in the May Allure. "The pictures they pose for, and the outfits they wear, with their boobs pushed up like earmuffs. And it's like, that's wonderful, hon, when you are 20 years old, but what will you do when you are 35 and your boobs don't want to go that way anymore? Where does your self-worth or personal pride come from then?" That comment is particularly depressing, and puzzling, from an actress who's shown that it's possible to convey straightforward sexuality without shortchanging your brains. (She herself has done a nude scene, in "Twilight.")

And although we're all supposed to have gotten past judging a woman's worth by her sexual behavior, in the minds of much of the contemporary moviegoing public, a woman who takes her clothes off on-screen becomes something other than an actor -- the word "slut" comes immediately to mind. Many moviegoers seem to expect purity out of actresses, often at the expense of other qualities (fearlessness, tenderness, the ability to read a line as if they mean it) that are far more valuable.

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