Demi Moore and the Subversive Politics of the Naked Body – DNyuz

By the late 1990s, after years of giving Hollywood her all and exposing most of herself, Demi Moore was beginning to fade. She had been a major movie star that decade, complete with huge hits, humiliating flops, celebrity friends, a celebrity wedding, and magazine cover headlines. Like all stars, she put in the work and sold the merchandise, including herself. And, like many female stars, she made movies with male filmmakers who turned her into a spectacle of desire, a spectacle she sought ownership of, in part, through her body.

You see a lot of her body in Moore’s latest film, “The Substance,” from French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat. (The film opens Sept. 20.) It’s a body-horror freakout that takes satirical aim at the commodification of women, and Moore is ferociously memorable as an actress who gets fired when she turns 50. It’s a performance strong enough to make you stop and think about the fact that she’s naked in so many scenes, strong enough to make you stop and wonder about her workout regimen or what, if anything, she does for a living. By the end, I was admiring how she had risen above the material; I also hoped she would make better films in the future.

She earns it. Her performance in “The Substance” is a showy, physically demonstrative role that requires her to convey a range of outrageous states that match the film’s excesses, from her character’s plastic smiles for the camera to her private desperation and seething rage. As in some of Moore’s best-known films, “The Substance” also requires her to remove her clothes. Even after decades of watching her perform in states of undress, it’s astonishing to see Moore, now 61, standing naked in front of a mirror as the camera pans slowly over her body. There’s an almost clinical quality to the way she looks at herself and, I think, a hint of defiance.

The ’80s were not a hospitable time for women in mainstream film, but Moore gradually managed to make a name for herself between hanging out with her friends in the Brat Pack and appearing in movies that were mediocre (“St. Elmo’s Fire”) and downright bad (“About Last Night,” ugh). Her big break came with “Ghost” (1990), a dreamy, mournful romance in which she played a dewy-eyed artist whose lover (Patrick Swayze) is murdered. Moore looked “terminally wistful most of the time” in the film, as Janet Maslin noted in The New York Times . Yet Moore also “combines toughness and delicacy in an appealing way,” a gift for characters who often seem compelled to protect their vulnerabilities.

“Ghost” was the highest-grossing film of the year, grossing more than half a billion dollars at the worldwide box office and catapulting Moore to genuine stardom. She followed this by starring in and producing “Mortal Thoughts” (1991), a deliciously grimy noir-ish drama about two working-class Jersey friends (Moore and Glenne Headley) who cover up the murder of one of their husbands, played with relish and convincing vulgarity by Moore’s husband at the time, Bruce Willis. One of her best films, it gave her a chance to express her range, in part because she was working with a real filmmaker, Alan Rudolph. Unlike many of her previous directors, he didn’t treat Moore like a sex doll, but instead helped her create a nuanced, teasingly elusive woman.

With the exception of “Ghost” and a few other notable releases, the early and mid-’90s weren’t much better for actresses than the previous decade. The month after “Ghost” premiered, Meryl Streep, speaking at the Screen Actors Guild’s first National Women’s Conference, shared some grim statistics the organization had collected. With their A-list guns, hunky adventurers and hyper-muscular heroes like Rambo, the ’80s had been so bad for women that by 1989, Streep told the audience, men had claimed 71 percent of feature film roles and were earning more than double what women did. “If the trend continues,” Streep warned ominously, “we may be out of the movies altogether by 2010.”

Despite this bleak landscape, Moore thrived in the ’90s—until she didn’t. After “Ghost,” she made headlines again in 1991 when she appeared massively pregnant and gorgeously nude on the cover of Vanity Fair, sending puritans to their fainting couches. (The accompanying article was as unflattering as the cover was, a sign that she had become an easy target.) She held her own opposite Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in the military-courtroom drama “A Few Good Men” (1992); starred in the low-budget drama “Indecent Proposal” (1993) as a married woman who sleeps with a billionaire for a million dollars; and played a villain opposite Michael Douglas in “Disclosure” (1994), a dishonest, sleazy thriller that tries to say something about sexual harassment but is really about male fears of female power.

Moore kept her clothes on more often than she took them off in her films, but it’s the films in which she took off her outfits, in part or in full, that predictably generated a lot of publicity and some idiotic outrage. They’re still the films with which she most identifies, for better or worse, the worst being the clumsy, grimly unfunny comedy “Striptease” (1996). She plays an exotic dancer who likes to play with Annie Lennox and tries to regain custody of her daughter while navigating a byzantine, politically charged plot. Moore has a few nice moments, showing off her comedic timing and the humanity of the dancer, but the film is mostly interested in showing off her body.

By the time Moore filmed “Striptease,” star salaries had skyrocketed; or, more accurately, the salaries of actors like Sylvester Stallone had skyrocketed. Bruce Willis, Moore wrote in her compelling 2019 memoir, “Inside Out,” was paid more than $20 million for the third “Die Hard” film. Moore was paid $12.5 million to star in “Striptease,” earning her the nickname Gimme Moore. Hard-boiled male stars like Willis, Stallone, Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others were rewarded handsomely for flaunting their six-packs and bulging biceps in ridiculous, giddily violent action films, while Moore was lambasted for having the audacity to expose herself in an equally nonsensical comedy about a heroic, loving single mother.

Looking back on that period, I wonder if all those professionally macho men played a role in her decision to star in Ridley Scott’s “GI Jane” (1997), another career highlight in which she bulked up to play a Navy SEAL. I love the film despite its flaws, including an unfortunate scene where Moore does some very impressive one-armed push-ups in short shorts while her nipples are stretched tight in a tank top. I can see why the scene was included. Moore was a celebrated, bankable sex symbol. She also sported a buzz cut for much of the film’s runtime and was otherwise so deglamorized that I imagine she, Scott and company felt they had to eroticize her to sell the film. It didn’t work; the film flopped big time.

In her memoir, Moore devotes a great deal of time to her children, husbands and films, but what stands out is the space she devotes to her body. It makes for painful, sometimes infuriating reading, as when she relives her experience with “Indecent Proposal.” She writes that although she agreed to the sex scenes, director Adrian Lyne promised to edit out anything she found offensive. “Yet I was on display again,” she writes, “and all I could think about was my body, my body, my body.” So she threw herself into a new exercise regimen until she felt good about her appearance. In response, Lyne told her she was too thin, the perverse inverse of what director Ed Zwick had told her for “About Last Night”: She was too fat.

Moore deserved better from Lyne, from Zwick, from the film industry that made her so much money, and from all the media types who greedily lapped her up until they flattered her with pleasure. Her career has seen her go through the usual stages of Hollywood stardom—invention, exploitation, idolization, rejection, and resurrection—with what seems like a lot of self-actualization, along with guts, sweat, and, yes, talent. In a career of box-office highs, mocked lows, and states of undress, she has been alternately celebrated and mocked for being exactly what the movies asked her to be: a fantasy, a fantasy that symbolizes how the world continues to look at women and now makes Moore stare back naked. And provocative.

The post Demi Moore and the Subversive Politics of the Naked Body appeared first on New York Times.