What If I Told You J.Laws Naked Fight Scene Was a Bold Feminist Victory?

As Sigmund Freud once wrote, penises are funny.

This truth has been passed down the generations from Monty Python to Judd Apatow, all of whom recognized in the phallus a classic comic character. A penis carries itself with pretensions to great dignity, but when you actually see it, all it does is flop around looking silly.

This gives much enjoyment to those of us who have one, but it does tend to overshadow the comic possibilities of the rest of the human body. (Butts excepted. A butt will never not be funny, and everyone knows it.) Thankfully, here comes No Hard Feelings, the new Jennifer Lawrence comedy that aims to resuscitate two different fading subgenres. It’s an unabashed star vehicle whose success rests mainly on the charms of its lead, and it also happens to be an R-rated sex comedy. When it comes to onscreen nudity, though, this self-consciously retro film is also a modest step forward. Lawrence’s nude scene in No Hard Feelings is funny in a way that only male movie stars’ nudity gets to be: It’s goofy, un-self-conscious, and has nothing to do with sex.

Lawrence plays Maddie, an aimless gig worker in her early 30s who accepts an indecent proposal from a pair of rich parents: “Date” their teenage son for the summer, in the hopes of giving him a confidence boost before he heads off to college. It’s a tougher task than it sounds. Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) is a good kid, but he’s painfully shy, and he reacts to Maddie coming onto him the way you or I might react to an alien landing in our backyard — the idea is so unfathomable he simply does not believe it’s happening. In this way, the film plays into the common fantasy of having Jennifer Lawrence try to seduce you while you stand there doing absolutely nothing. You can understand why it’s been well reviewed!

One of the pleasures of a studio comedy is seeing people act out bigger, more outrageous behavior than you typically see in real life. No Hard Feelings gives us one such scene midway through the film. Maddie and Percy are starting to bond, and Percy is taking the first steps out of his shell. Because this is a movie, that can only mean one thing: skinny-dipping. And of course, no sooner have Maddie and Percy gotten their hair wet than some misbehaving teens show up and steal their clothes.

That trope is to be expected, but what happens next probably isn’t. Maddie strides fully naked out of the surf and administers a Greco-Roman-style beatdown, in a way that Patrick Stewart on Extras would approve of.

It’s a hilarious scene, and in its own small way, groundbreaking. This is a totally different style of comic nudity than Hollywood tends to give its actresses. When women get funny nude scenes in the movies, it usually happens in one of a few ways. Either they’re in a sex scene that’s played for humor (Emma Thompson in The Tall Guy), or they’re being sexy in unsexy surroundings (Malin Akerman in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle). Or else, they’re being caught naked in an embarrassing situation, where the audience is supposed to laugh at their predicament while also leering at them a little. Most regrettable is the “Kathy Bates in About Schmidt” kind of nudity, where the movie tries to wring comedy out of the sight of a body that’s not conventionally attractive.

By contrast, the most obvious comparison to No Hard Feelings is Viggo Mortensen’s full-frontal brawl in Eastern Promises — which is humorous in a murder-y sort of way — and there are also shades of Sacha Baron Cohen and Ken Davitian’s bare-butted scuffle in Borat. (Though that one gets points docked for employing black censor bars.) The joke is not that Maddie’s embarrassed; it’s that she’s not embarrassed. She’s so full of rage that she won’t let a little nudity get between her and a smackdown.

Lawrence is one of the producers of No Hard Feelings, and it feels intentional that, in the rest of the film, her character is otherwise covered up. In the scenes where Maddie’s trying to be sexy, she’s always fully clothed. When she goes surfing, she wears a long-sleeve rash guard. Even at the beginning of the skinny-dipping scene, which is meant to be alluring, the camera shoots her from the shoulders up, almost safe enough for PG.

In the run-up to Red Sparrow, Lawrence often spoke about how that movie’s nude scenes were a way of reclaiming power after the 2014 celebrity-phone hack. While I feel a little ridiculous positing a nude scene as some kind of bold feminist victory, it does seem that something similar is going on in No Hard Feelings. Lawrence is letting the audience see her body, but only in a very specific context, with very specific aims. Boorish complaints that the movie is a “waste of boobs” are the point. She’s not letting you in if you’re trying to drool. Only if you’re trying to laugh.

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