Breasts in Film and beyond

Now, it would seem that filming breasts so they look good wouldn't be hard. Heck, guys love to look at 'em, so just put 'em on the screen and let 'em be ogled. But like so much in cinema, it's not just a matter of point and shoot. There are good techniques and bad techniques for showing off breasts in film, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about what I think works . . . and what doesn't.

1. Bigger isn't necessarily better. I like big breasts. Of course. Who doesn't. But should they all really be Easy Money huge? I don't think so. Recently, I was writing about facial plastic surgery for a web site, and in doing my research the temptation to look at before and after pictures of breast augmentations was too strong. So sue me. Oddly enough, it wasn't really an erotic experience. But it was an aesthetic one. It really gave me a chance to look at breasts in a detached, formal way. I mostly paid attention to shape, trying to grasp what exactly it is about it that so entrances me. Skin and gravity warring over the distribution of lipids reduces and sometimes inverts the convexity of the top and accentuates it on the bottom, producing a shape not unlike an ocean swell. It's so easy to imagine bobbing up and down there, a thought accentuated by the fluid movement of them when a woman walks. Having looked at possibly hundreds of photos, I've decided that C-cups are best. Purely from a perspective of balance, this is the point at which the weight of the lipids pulls the breasts down to give them a full appearance, but not so much that they appear to sag.

2. Cleavage is always good in movies. And who doesn't like it in real life? Let's get real: what's better than cleavage? But in the movies, it's especially good. Something about the lighting or the camera angle or just the fact that you can stare without feeling like too much of a creep: it pretty much always works.

3. Let them be free. Shout it from the mountain on out to the sea, peace in the valley, breasts got to be free. Just as you wouldn't gag a full-voiced actor like James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman, you can't keep breasts so tightly bound that they can't wash like hypnotic waves over the viewer. Let 'em move. Naturally.

With those three rules understood, let's look at some noteworthy moviemakers and/or films.

Russ Meyer--of course we've got to talk about the man who's known for his fetish with breasts, but unfortunately he often violates all three of my rules. Because he's interested in big breasts, which require lots of support, they are rarely allowed to move freely, nor does he shoot them to properly show off their movement.

Andy Sidaris, on the other hand, while generally dismissed, is a man who really knows how to make a movie that's pretty much about breasts. Although his films are often labeled 3B: Bullets, bombs, and breasts it's really the latter that makes his movies worthwhile. If anything, because they're pretty poor movies altogether. Hard Ticket to Hawaii, for example, has piss-poor plot, character development, and special effects. Most of the action sequences are lame and boring. But there's something satisfying in watching our heroine battle it out with a mutant snake and an evil assassin when every move she makes shivers through her breasts. And he knows how dumb his movies are, making them only eye candy.

Pedro Almodovar really doesn't belong on this list, since he's a real filmaker who makes really good films. But he merits mention because of what he did with Penelope Cruz in Volver. Bravo, my good man.

And let's not forget David Lynch, whose metafilm strategies manage to strangely de-eroticize the lesbian love scene in Mulholland Drive, despite the presence of breasts.

A few other notes:

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is worth watching for Caroline Munro's cleavage alone.

Megan Fox was a great distraction in Transformers, but not enough to save that movie.

Marilyn Monroe's breasts look great in Some Like it Hot, but it's so hard to decide who's better in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: her or Jane Russell.

It was so sad to lose Lake Bell from the cast of Boston Legal.

Scarlett Johansson's breasts aren't too big because she's beautiful and well-proportioned and sometimes she can act.

Put all Hope out of your mind.

And masturbate as little as possible. It drains the strength.

With that little bit of wisdom from Papillon, I'd like to move on to sharing a little classical wisdom from Hesiod on things related to this blog.

First his somewhat erotic description of the muses:

Their soft feet move in the dance that rings

The violet-dark spring and the altar of Zeus.

They bathe their lithe bodies in the water of Permessos

Or of Hippokrene or of god-haunted Olmeios.

Which seems to promise that their lithe bodies could be coming to some water near you, although they have been gone from me for some time. Hesiod also tells us of Venus:

From her come young girls' whispers and smiles and deception

And honey-sweet love and its joyful pleasures.

And on marriage:

The right time to bring a wife to your home

Is when you are only a few years younger than thirty,

or just a few years older. This is the right time for marriage.

Five years past puberty makes a woman a suitable bride.

Marry a virgin so you can teach her right from wrong.

Choose from among the girls who live near you and check

Every detail, so that your wife will not be the neighborhood joke.

Nothing is better for man than a good wife.

Miscellaneous advice:

It is not good for boys twelve days or twelve years old

To sit on that which is motionless,

For such an act unmans even a man in his prime.

A man should not sleek his body with a woman's bath water,

For in time even this is cruelly punished.

Do not piss as you stand and face the sun,

but do it after the sun sets and before it rises.

Sire your children when you return from a feast of the gods.

In your house do not sit by the hearth

With your genitals exposed and bespattered with semen.

Ah, advice as bronze as the day it was printed. And something we can all agree on.

Hair, Pt. 2

Hair down there was featured in all the porn that blew through my yard. It naturally became associated with the truly incomprehensible acts being portrayed therein. Then, when I moved from porn on the wind to the pinup phase of my development, it disappeared. Breasts were always in full view, but pubic hair was generally concealed by garments or strategically positioned legs. Except in a few images, where hints and wisps of it emerged here and there to imply the greater mysteries beyond. And they were mysteries, because even in the actual Playboys of the day, you saw hair, but little real anatomical detail. (Of course, Penthouse showed everything, but in a way that ruined it for me.) The hint was magical, though. I remember one image of a woman crouching to drink from a hose. The water splashed onto her white blouse, making it translucent, and her legs were spread, so that you could see up one leg of her very short cutoff jean shorts. Not only could you see hair in there, but a few strands emerged and caught the sunlight. Here was a mystery whose furthest edge was bared to the sun, but still concealed. The mystery of the pussy is essential to the masculine erotic imagination. For us, our dicks just hang out there all the time, but women, even when they are naked, are concealed. Like angel wings, the pudenda enfolds around the secrets of female sexuality: clitoris, vagina, and all the subtle forms we both long and fear to touch.

Personal preferences aside, there are very good reasons for liking one or another style of grooming. The purpose of pubic hair is to catch sexual fluids and expose them to air so they evaporate and spread hormones on the breeze. In other words, pubic hair is kind of designed to get wet and smell. So, if you want to have sex with as little messy fluids as possible, and you're concerned about odor, you've definitely got to do something about the hair. That's your choice, but once you start down the path, you might end up with something like Daniel Evans Weiss describes in The Roaches Have no King:
A summary of my depressing examination will suffice: her labia majora were cool and dry. The footing around her clitoris was firm, and the clitoris itself was tiny. Disappointed by her odor, her texture, her talc . . . I stuck my head into her vagina. Oh, there were powerful tastes in there. One was vinegar. The other was a poor chemical imitation of strawberry. She had poured herself a TV pussy, which is probably exactly what her tin-can husband liked.

But me, I like my deep romantic chasms to be savage places.

Hair

Now, it may be because I grew up in the 70s, but I think a head of >ahem< long, beautiful hair is essential to a woman's beauty. I've already mentioned my mom's friend, Laura, and how she helped develop my sense of beauty in a woman. She was a small woman, and, in addition to the big sunglasses and floppy hats of the day, she had really long hair. In my memory, it's the color of a nice pilsner, and it flows like one: cool in the sun as it fills the curve of the glass.

So I've always loved long hair, the way its tendrils trace the shapes of women's bodies, frame their faces, and become mischievous arrows that point here, to cleavage, here to the hollow of the throat, here to the ass. Here's a bit from the Rubaiyat that I think captures the intoxication of hair:




Perplexed no more with human or divine
Tomorrow's tangle to the winds resign
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The cypress-slender minister of wine.

Most of my girlfriends have had long hair, and mostly blonde or red-headed, from coppery and fiery to pale straw-colored. I've only dated one brunette, but, paradoxically, she's the one I married. Go figure.

But there's other hair to talk about. Let's look at some literature, such as Eliot's contribution to the subject:
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?

Oh, presume, presume, my good man. I've always thought this a nice little bit about the paralyzing enticements of desire. And I love the hair, so soft visually, implying the touch, but never reaching it.

And this bit from Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North:


Mrs. Robinson was a buxom woman and with a bronze complexion that harmonized with Cairo as if she were a picture tastefully chosen to go with the color of the walls in a room. I would look at the hair of her armpits and have a sensation of panic.

Okay, so as Americans, hairy armpits are not exactly a turn-on. I remember being shocked by the pictures outside a Greek porno theater where the women had completely natural armpits. I just have a hard time dealing with that. But Salih captures something here, with his "sensation of panic" (although the words are a translator's), an effective euphemistic truth akin to Updike's "it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron." Stomach, indeed. He's making the connection between a woman's armpit and her pudenda, a really logical connection that was also used effectively in Cronenberg's Rabid. Making that connection, it makes sense that Americans would move from shaven pits to shaven nethers, though it really is a shame, since, as I said, I'm a fan of hair. I recently came up with a new theory on why, which I'll share in another post, since this one is getting long.





I'll close with another quote from Salih on hair:





This last idea converged in my mind on the tiny hairs on her right arm near to the wrist, and I noticed that the hairs on her arm were thicker than with most women, and this led my thoughts to other hair. It would certainly be as soft and abundant as cypress-grass on the banks of a stream.





Or a sacred river.

A spot of poetry

Oh, and one more thing. Lately, I've been infatuated with this Millay poem:

Never, never may the fruit be plucked from the bough
And gathered into barrels.
He that would eat of love must eat it where it hangs.
Though the branches bend like reeds,
Though the ripe fruit splash in the grass or wrinkle on the tree,
He that would eat of love may bear away with him
Only what his belly can hold.
Nothing in the apron,
Nothing in the pockets.
Never, never may the fruit be gathered from the bough
And harvested in barrels.
The winter of love is a cellar of empty bins,
In an orchard soft with rot.

Shiverous, huh? So true and beautiful and harsh all at once. It captures the tragedy of the sensuality of the progress of love.

Or maybe it's just peach season again.

Spanish Television

I don't have cable, but that's okay. Now I get three times as many stations as I used to, although two-thirds of them are Spanish, religious, or home shopping networks.

Flipping through the channels, I realize one thing Latin TV programmers know: everything is better if you put a woman with great cleavage and a short skirt in it. Take for example the show Que Dice La Gente? (What do the people say?) on Telefutura. Basically, it's The Family Feud, but not only do they add a couple of skimpily-clad women who walk on stage periodically, but they dedicate the first half of the show to a competition between variously-named groups of attractive men and women. This time, it's Las Venus vs. Los Adonis. And the women dress great. Tops that really show off their busts, short skirts or shorts, sometimes tall boots, and, dios mio, sometimes even hats that, I think, really do something special for a woman's face. Here's J-Lo in something of the style, although not quite right. Actually, I like this image because she reminds me of my mom's friend Laura, who I knew when I was very young, and was my first image of what a sexy woman was like.

Desire

I say this blog is about the beauty of the female form, and it is, but the aesthetic appreciation of woman is inextricable from desire. A man cannot look at a woman and believe she is attractive without feeling the beginnings of longing.

There are three pieces of fiction that I think capture man's desire in all its inglorious polymorphity: "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses," by Irwin Shaw. "Mr. Durant," by Dorothy Parker, and Jazz by Toni Morrison. You may not agree, but each of these authors captures the sometimes subtle, sometimes unconscious, but always automatic and always detailed attention men pay to women's bodies. It may seem perverse, and perhaps it is, but it is the way we are made. The Picture of Dorian Grey also has something to say on the depths of depravity created by publicly denying our passions.

The nature of desire struck me again today as I was walking downtown in my new old home at lunch time and after, when the streets were full of women of all manner of beauties. Hard, able bodies with stern faces and pulled-back black hair. A smooth-walking French girl in loose, flowing pants that quivered all up and down her long, long legs. And then her, standing out in a group of ten office girls, all tightly done up for work, but she had a body whose promise of pleasure could not be stifled or silenced as she hurried down the street, her breasts registering the impact of step after step after step.

Perhaps I am a pervert, but what is beauty for if not to be seen and enjoyed?

Back Up

In the past I've talked about breasts as ass-analog, necessary since we're upright-walkers, a theory most people are familiar with these days. What isn't talked about as much is that the ass, as we know it, is also a product of our upright carriage.

If we take a look at most apes, they rely on color more than size to call attention to the female ass. Baboons have mostly flat asses, but colorful, and when the female goes into estrus, her, ahem, cunny is so red, well, you might even say it glows.

Of course, chimpanzees, our closest neighbor sexually, do rely primarily on size to call attention to the ass. Especially during estrus, when the female's entire ass region blows up into a huge balloon.

Flash forward to humans, who needed to reinvent our entire musculature for walking upright. Guess what we needed more than anything else: lots of muscle in the ass. For chimp-like minds, this would look like a female who is constantly in a state of estrus, always ready for sex. And coincidentally, she is. Humans are among a very select group of species whose females don't go through "heat" per se, but are constantly cycling. I wonder whether the ass led to that, since males were getting too many false positive signals, so the more successful females were those that turned the false positives into true positives.

Ah, ass, is there any better example of form and function?

The wisp of a smile

Like everything else about a woman, her smile is mysterious. It's hard to say why it affects us so. It's a simple matter, the curve of her lips, the rise in her cheeks, maybe a flash of her teeth. Part of it, of course, is like the look in her eyes: it shows us she's listening, attentive, warming to our company. But it seems a waysign pointing us on to more. A smile is so often the prelude to a kiss.

There are two smiles I really like. The first is the light smile, that comes and goes like sun-dappled shade beneath the spreading branches of a wind-touched tree. Youth, energy, eagerness all go along with this smile, and, of course, the need for constant entertainment. She lets you know the second she isn't having fun. And fun is what this smile is all about. A little flirt, a little play, just for tonight and maybe the next day, but there are no worries here.

But if a woman is to have a serious smile, it should be an arch smile. There should be something of the diabolic there. With this woman, you never know how you're doing, and you probably don't want to know. She's taking you where she wants to go, and after you've been there, there's nothing to do but log the memories and count your losses. Almost always, there's nothing you can lose that's more precious than the memories.

These are rare and special pleasures, but almost any woman's smile is worth taking a moment to say hello and put out the invitation of your own smile, and maybe add a little compliment.

The Most Intriguing Part of a Woman

I had a girlfriend who said that the most intriguing part of a woman was the hollow at the base of her throat. On her, it might have been.



Okay, that's not exactly fair. She had really, really great pale blue eyes that could emote complex configurations of emotion like no one else I've ever known. No emotion with her was unalloyed, it was always happy-confused-terrified-melancholy, or sad-bemused-whimsical or something. And she had kind of a cute face around those eyes, but her body was unfortunate, just too wide and squat and bulky to ever really be attractive. I could go into detail, but I'll leave it at that to be kind.







Also, she was not the brightest star in the Southern Cross, either. Look at this image of Eva Green from Casino Royale and let me know what you find most intriguing:

I promised poetry on the blog, so here's some Greek ribaldry:

Sing with me a slim lass,
Pierian Muses.
You touch to beauty all
that your song chooses.
Lovely Bombyka, a gypsy
others may see:
bony and sunburnt, but
honeypale to me.
Dark the scrawled hyacinth
and the violet,
but those are the flowers that first
in a wreath we set.
Wolf goes after goat,
goat after clover.
Storks go following ploughs,
I'm your true lover.

Pinups

Now that the awkward first post is out of the way, I can forge on ahead with my subject, posting daily as long as my enthusiasm holds and my wife doesn't find out. Of course, if T doesn't like me posting on these subjects, maybe we can sit down and talk about them. That'd be fine with me, but I don't think it's going to happen.

You guys that know me know I spent my kindergarten and 1st grade years in a neighborhood where porn just drifted by on the breeze. Perhaps this accounts for my perversion (or healthy honesty) on the subject of the female body. But most of that stuff was just raunch, the kind of thing that'd be good much later for choking the chicken, but really didn't teach me anything about beauty.

What did teach me about beauty was a discovery I made a little later, a collection of Vargas' paintings for Playboy. Really a beautiful magazine, it was dozens of paintings of women in mostly softcore poses showing off what they had. Sort of. Few of the pictures had more than a hint of pubic hair. Mostly they were this sort of thing. But they really hit me. I looked at them again and again and again until the magazine disappeared, mysteriously. A tragic loss.

But these women became a benchmark for me. Curvy, mostly busty, luxurious and playful, they were sexy, but they were more than just sex objects. Maybe it's just me, but I read a lot of personality into the banal one-liners, the fixed expressions, and seductive postures.

Recently, I've really come back around to an appreciation of pinups. they're erotic art of the sort that in the days of ancient Greece would be all over the walls, and sculpted everywhere, art that very simply acknowledges the fact that sex is normal, natural, and vital, and that, hey, men love to look at women (and in the case of Greece sometimes men) sexually. In ceding the pinup from the realm of accepted male culture, we've given up our right to be men without being considered perverts. And we've become pushed more toward the tawdry end of erotic art, the really graphic pornography which is cheap and easy to produce and which encourages us to have only one, very base, erotic response.

Now, I like my base erotic response as much as the next guy, but sometimes all I want is the cheer that comes from looking at the nicely balanced shape of a beautiful woman. A lopsided smile on my face, a skip in my heart, and a twinge in my crotch are sometimes just what I need to get me through a bland day, and it's sad that it's not allowed.

Fortunately, there are still artists at work out there. Here are a couple of my favorites. Andrew Bawidamann does a lot of really good work, much of it military-themed, plugging into the notion that the pinup is an integral part of the US military tradition. His work captures a lot of what's best about pinups: the innocence, the fun, the stylized beauty. I like what he does with movement and shape. His women's breasts and butts do what they're supposed to do when the women move in inertial and non-inertial frames, if I may get physical.

Frank Cho is a comic book artist, but, really, his work is ideal for pinups, at least partly because his writing isn't that great. But, boy, he does know how to draw a hot woman. This is not the picture I wanted to put here (I wanted to show my ass-men friends what he can do with plump posteriors), but my scanner is on the fritz, so it'll have to do. Besides, this particular picture captures again the spirit of the pinup, although in the peculiar fantasy world of Sheena.

Let's call that good for now.

Nothing like the sun

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Test Post

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea