Spoilers for Saltburn: Skip to the Next Section to Avoid

When Barry Koeghan’s Oliver prances around the gargantuan estate of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, he does so in nothing. This stark display of male nudity in movies reflects the evolution of such imagery in cinema. Playing a game aspirationally reminiscent of Tom Ripley, Oliver has stripped the old money of its disdainful pretensions, and to the sounds of Sophie Ellis Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” (very subtle), he’s tried to claim their ostentatious power and its shadowy legacy as his own. He is buck naked, nimble, pert, fiery, and his audience is only us. 

Saltburn is lightly considerate of history, mostly the tensions between old money and new, but it can add a notch in its belt for the way it parades its transgressions: in striking imagery by Fennell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren we see Keoghan with period blood slathered across his face; Keoghan, in silhouette, insert his penis into the soft ground where the object of his obsessions (Jacob Elordi) was just put to rest; and, yes, Keoghan don a little Tom Cruise drag to celebrate his hard won fortune. We’re a far cry away from when it was only cigarettes and train tunnels that could nod towards unseemly behavior.

Historical Context of Nudity in Film

But if Saltburn is both fantasy and neocon cautionary tale, its use of male nudity, full frontal at that, plays into the curious and contradictory history of frontal nudity in film, which itself offers differing visions of what movies should be. Pornography spans as far back as 1880s or ‘90s, during an age when single reelers were little else but curios and entertainments.

As film began industrializing in the 1910s and 1920s, it was during this period that Hollywood began racking up scandals, from the Fatty Arbuckle rape trial to the death of dreamer Peg Entwistle, that would lead to a new era of brokering between the interests of the Catholic Church and producers looking to avoid reputation that Hollywood was filled with debauchery and sin. It was this turn from the salacious 1920s to salvation following the Wall Street crash of 1929 that would have a lasting impact on the way nudity would factor into mainstream cinema.

The Hays Code and Its Impact

With the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America’s Production Code, called the “Hays Code” for its president William H Hays but spearheaded by Joseph Breen and which was a self-imposed do and don’t list that lasted from 1934 to 1968. But this code, even though a nascent form existed before it was codified, wasn’t really enforced until the late 1930s; when it was, it had an irreparable impact on how people perceived interracial relationships, sexuality, homosexuality, crime, violence, religion, capitalism, and gender roles.

The Rise of Nudity Post-Hays Code

Not until Jayne Mansfield showed skin in Promises! Promises! (1963), a sex comedy directed by King Dononvan banking on Mansfield’s ironic/not ironic bombshell looks, would frontal nudity of any kind be on the table for mainstream film. It would also get the ball rolling as far as the gradual fall of this particular brand of Hollywood self censorship.

The Hays Code slowly started to cannibalize itself in the 1950s, not least of all due to “the 1952 Supreme Court ruling in Burstyn v. Wilson — which granted film First Amendment protections”, according to Kristin Hunt, which then started to shape the uncomfortable dialogue between filmmakers pushing boundaries and the paradigm of Hollywood’s notion of both being in the loop with its audiences and the tools it had to determine content. 

The Motion Picture Association of America introduced the ratings system in 1968, granting an illusion of freedom of choice for the viewer. Ken Russell’s Women in Love, Midnight Cowboy, and M*A*S*H were all amongst the earliest examples of testing how nudity played both to the industry, therefore the MPAA, and audiences. Both Midnight Cowboy and M*A*S*H would win Best Picture, with the former being the only film in Hollywood history to be rated X and take home the big gold statuette.

Male Nudity vs. Female Nudity in Film

Films like Last Tango in Paris, Midnight Cowboy, Showgirls, and Eyes Wide Shut were films that both tested the ground for new ratings systems (the former two initially rated X, the latter NC-17) as well as for a market of non-pornographic adult cinema. In the midst of these cultural battles, female nudity would primarily occupy these conversations. 

In comparison to the early ‘60s nudity of Marilyn and Jayne, Richard Gere would be notable for his role in shifting the landscape of male nudity in movies with his appearance in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo nearly two decades later in 1980. There are other examples, to be sure, from Kevin Bacon in Wild Things to Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises, and more recently Chris Pine in Outlaw King, but most of these scenes are deliberately not erotic. If the film industry is at all instructive, it’s been careful with how it wants to frame sexuality in its gendered forms: is it too dangerous and naughty to sexualize a man when he’s in a sexual state? Why moreso than a woman? Often enough, like in Bruno or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, male nudity is comedy.

International Cinema and Male Nudity

The female form has been an object of desire in art long enough that it was readily exploited in visual media, but, though there are plenty examples of nude men in art, film’s relationship to male nudity is more fraught. Only pioneers in international cinema seemed to seek, if not parity, then at least a more active interest in men’s bodies, from Bergman’s Persona (1966) to I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967). But there’s nearly an effortful desexualization in these scenes, that a man’s body can be neutral while a woman’s can be sexual.

Contemporary Views on Male Nudity in Movies

While frontal male nudity is still rarer, there have been notable examples in the last few years, but they, too, still sit outside of the margins. There’s Red Rocket (2021), Rotting in the Sun (2023), and Passages (2023), a return to the eroticizing of the male form, but not without some irony. Perhaps the fact that the penis can, by its very physiological nature, be a barometer of attraction or arousal, it’s harder to circumvent the very sexuality of it all. Not that other erogenous zones caught on camera don’t also have tell tale signs of feeling hot and heavy, but the penis is a sort of unmistakable one, blunt and confrontational. And film and television’s history with sex has ultimately always been fraught, tugging between wanting to see it but not too much of it. You can’t leave much to the imagination with the penis. 

But you can tempt others with the promise of something. Even if the penis’s presence in something like Rotting in the Sun is basically a gag, that the film, alongside Passages, were both on MUBI gives a hint of titillation. Perhaps this explains HBO, Starz, and other networks of the same ilk’s foray into male nudity.

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If these platforms exist on the promise of subscribers, then how do you get more of them? The promise of new ground broken and new parts of life, of the body, to be exposed. Soon enough, in the age of OnlyFans and PornHub, the penis, as much as any other body part, might becomes a product as banal as yesterday’s peekaboo nip slip. 

In the context of nudity in film and television, audiences seem split between finding female nudity not that transgressive anymore and finding any kind of sexuality frightening. A poll from UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers says that, of the 1500 young people, ages 10-24, “47.5% reported that sex is not necessary to the majority of TV show and movie plots.” Marvel movies have extremely hot people but are basically sexless, and you can spot a little bit of skin in Todd Haynes’ May December. There may be male nudity on your Euphorias and your White Lotuses, but in film, it still feels like a game yet to be won.

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About the Contributor

Kyle Turner is currently based in Brooklyn, NY, he has over five years of experience crying at my laptop, yelling at my screen, and “writing”. In addition to being a contributor to Paste Magazine, his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Slate, Playboy.com, GQ, NPR, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere.

Passionate about the intersections of pop culture, film studies, and queer theory, he has written about LGBTQ representation in film and TV, the history of queer cinema, classic film, James Bond, Stephen Sondheim’s Company, and “camp”, amongst other things.

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