Exhibit N in my continuing investigation of the repressed sexuality of American cinema is Neve Campbell, one of the more naturally sensual actresses of her generation and also, as we remember from her teasing moments of near-nudity in Scream and Wild Things, one of the least exhibitionistic.
Campbell, whose refusal to get naked has surely cost her some measure of fame and money, is a much more interesting case than, say, her old Party of Five co-star Jennifer Love Hewitt, who’s been similarly protective of the last few inches of her special parts but doesn’t seem to mind debasing herself in all sorts of creative ways for lad mags like Maxim and Stuff.
Hewitt instrumentalizes her body. She shows it off in the most objectified (but not quite naked) way when it suits her, but keeps it sufficiently clothed to maintain a certain air of virginality that she’s obviously concluded is essential to preserving her viability in the consumer imagination as a good girl. Whenever she decides that it’s to her professional advantage to get naked, we can be sure that Hewitt will get naked.
Campbell, on the other hand, seems to protect her private parts as a matter of principle, or if not principle than perhaps modesty. She’s gotten really nekked, in the movies, only once, in James Toback’s When Will I Be Loved, a small independent flick in which she plays a poor little rich girl who gets involved in a skeezy triangle of sexual, financial, and transactional shenanigans with her skeezy boyfriend and a skeezy Italian count (is there any other kind?).
Even in When Will I Be Loved, however, which opens with this scene of Campbell soaping herself up in the shower (not to mention getting herself off with the detachable shower head), there’s a protectiveness of Campbell’s nudity. We get the ass, and we get the side of the breasts, but we never quite get the nipple, or the coochie-coo. And the masturbation is shot from such an angle and at such a distance that you don’t even quite realize at first what’s happening and by the time you do it’s too late to really enjoy the moment.
Part of what makes Campbell so alluring, and perhaps, if we’re being ungenerous, part of what makes her so modest, is that she doesn’t have a perfect body. She has a beautiful body, but it’s a real-looking one rather than the wowza superhero kind of body that her Wild Things co-star Denise Richards has deployed to such appetizing effect.
The mistake Campbell has made, however, is that in addition to refusing to allow her body to be objectified and wank-ified for the sake of money or celebrity, she’s also fetishized that refusal, and in the process has compromised her art. She’s made those moments that should have been about her character’s eroticism, exhibitionism, modesty or prudery about, instead, the nuanced sensibility of Neve Campbell. She lent an discordant note of prudery to the almost sublime shallowness and campiness of Wild Things. She kept her shirt on in 54, which was a weak movie but would have, nonetheless, been a good opportunity for Campbell to explore her erotic personality onscreen. And she finally handed her N-card over to James Toback, a skeevy but talented director who understands male carnality in interesting ways but tends to disbelieve in female desire, interpreting it instead as a mask for the desire for power and control.
Compare Campbell’s record to that of Nicole Kidman, who has managed to quietly give some of the most erotic performances in American cinema over the last 20 years (see, for example, To Die For, Malice, Birthday Girl and Eyes Wide Shut). Kidman’s nudity, or modesty, never seems gratuitous; it seems appropriate. She gives the character, and therefore the audience, what it deserves.
Campbell is a good actress, and she has no obligation to anyone to get naked on screen (though as should be clear by now, I wouldn’t mind if she did), but she’s clearly fascinated by the power of her body, and she’s clearly interested in exploring it as an actress — unfortunately, she’s been unwilling, as of yet, to commit to that exploration in a deep way.
