gwyn | In praise of the power of suggestion

I finally got the chance to see Master and Commander yesterday, though it had gone from the best theatre in town, the Cinerama, and of course, loved it as much as anyone else. There was also a double dose of Horatio Hornblower this past week on A&E, and so my British naval uniform fixation was ably handled by all this stuff. (Although, I have one quibble with everyone who discussed M&C -- why didn’t anyone mention that Billy Boyd was in it? I was so thrilled; I’ve grown quite smitten with him.) Of course Russell looked unbearably hot in his poofy shirt and the long flowing locks. But it was Pellew in his admiral’s uniform on HH that got me really going; you’re right,

merryish, Robert Lindsay is still of the hot, even with a few more pounds and a few more wrinkles. There’s something about all that high-collared, buttoned-up, gleaming and glitteringly decorated stuff covering a guy up, and then the occasional glimpse of forearm or chest, that makes me go “oooooo.”

A long time ago, I realized that I prefer people to be covered up. At least a little -- that the power of suggestion, the hint at what’s beneath, is far sexier to me than total nakediddity. Not that I don’t appreciate a full-on disrobing, or anything. One of the things I love about many of my favorite actors is that they’re not afraid to drop trou, and to flout that annoying convention that full nudity from a woman is PG-13 material, but a glimpse of penis is at least R. Actors like James Marsters, Russell, Clive Owen, Sean Bean, Ewan MacGregor, Liam Neeson, David Duchovny, Harvey Keitel (not that I necessarily want to see Harvey nekkid, it’s more the principle), Michael Biehn, Roy Dupuis (who’s not even content to just be naked as hell throughout most of a movie, he’ll even do a fairly graphic simulated sex scene with another man),and probably most of the acting contingent from Down Under -- I’ve gathered quite an extensive list of favorite guys who are also willing to go the full full frontal route and don’t seem to have any issues.

But it’s often that suggestion, or of being partly dressed, with mere glimpses of skin, that I like best, even when the actor is willing to go all the way. There’s something about being half dressed, or a uniform undone so that the character is down to their shirt and trousers, or a shirt sleeve rolled up on a forearm, that can set my imagination in gear and make it much sexier. Even though I know Lord of the Rings isn’t exactly a pulchritude-fest, I found a scene in Fellowship to be incredibly slashy and sexy in a surprising way -- when Boromir and Aragorn are in Lothlorien, talking about Gondor and the White City, each of them has shed a lot of his gear and is finally relaxed a little. Aragorn has his sleeves rolled up on his forearms, and that seemed like the closest thing to pass for sex in the movie -- it’s suggestive forearm flirting! Plus, you throw in the intensity of their conversation, the way they’re bonding finally, and it’s all very. . . yummy. And so suggestive to someone with that (okay, admittedly perverse) frame of mind.

There’s a total Z-level movie Michael Biehn made a number of years ago called Breach of Trust (I know it has another name I can’t remember), where we get the closest scene he’s ever done to true full-frontal, but except for a well-placed camera just hovering at the edge of his hip, we don’t see everything. But what we do get to see is quite lovely, and it’s that suggestion that’s both frustrating (because it’s such a tease) and compelling at the same time. Later in Magnificent 7, when he’s sitting in a big copper tub in the episode Obesssion, you can see nearly everything under the waterline and you know he’s naked as a jaybird under there; the only thing making it TV-friendly is a well-placed circle of soap scum. There’s something about all that that’s even sexier than if he were prancing around; we’re seeing a lot, but not everything, and our minds fill in the rest.

My Ex used to have quite the extensive porn collection, but nothing got him more hot and bothered than the Victoria’s Secret catalogs I used to get sent by the pound. It took me a long time before I understood what he saw in those things. He once rhapsodized about the suggestion of it, especially things like the then-fashionable over the knee stockings with mini-skirts, where you got about three inches of bare thigh between stocking and skirt hem. The whole garters and stockings thing got him panting like a dog, too, because, as he explained it, the lines of fabric outlining patches of bare skin, and the hint of being able to take things off slowly, in pieces, was irresistible. Mostly I just laughed at him, but over the years I’ve come to understand what he was saying. It used to be that so few actors were willing to be naked on screen (and that so few movies were willing to risk the higher ratings because of puritanical nudity double standards), that you never really had the chance to say, well, I prefer a little clothing on my man. But now that it’s more common to see actors in the buff, I’m realizing how much I like it when they’re more suggestive in their approach to this. The fact that we’ve been able to see some of these guys nude, though, also helps -- we have less work to titillate our imaginations because we have seen them in the altogether, so future glimpses where they’re not naked might have more power than if we’ve never seen the whole man.

Sometimes, too, it feels exploitative, just as much as it has in the past for women actors. I know that after JM talked about how he’d started to feel like a piece of meat towards the end of season 6 on Buffy, it made it a bit harder for me to view those scenes with the same level of squealy, adolescent glee that I’d taken before in seeing so very much of him on screen. So here’s hoping for maybe a little less skin, but an extra dose of suggestion now that he’s back in the world again on Angel. And much as I loved the gorgeously framed nude backside scenes on Now and Again of the spectacuar Eric Close, my favorite publicity still of him during that time period (which I wish I could make an icon of, dammit!) is one where he’s wearing these midnight blue pajama pants and an open white shirt (is there anything sexier than a white shirt? I ask you), sitting on the edge of a barely made bed, and he has bare feet and the cuffs of the shirt are undone. This is simply the sexiest picture I’ve ever seen of any guy, I think, and it’s so wonderfully suggestive, just enough skin of the feet and lower legs, the chest and stomach, that it’s breathtaking. And you can think anything about it.

There’s something about watching someone, too, who’s all buttoned up normally (whether it’s Pellew in his high-collared, super formal uniform or Lt. Castillo’s sixties Dragnet-inspired uniform of thin black tie, plain black trousers, and short-sleeved white JC Penny shirt), becoming slightly unbuttoned, particularly when they’re around someone else. Again, it sends hints to our imagination, gives us blanks we can fill in in our own way. They always say the brain is our most powerful sex organ, and I think they’re right. When it comes to sex appeal and sexual excitement, I think I’d pick the power of suggestion any day. Give me a bare forearm extending from a rolled-up poofy shirt sleeve, or a glimpse of thigh under a loosely thrown sheet, and I’m there.