Damon Lindelof: 'I Want to Normalize Male Nudity on Television'
Bring out your dongs!
"The Leftovers" showrunner Damon Lindelof told TVLine he's "passionate about" getting equal full-frontal representation on television, and he backed that up by showing both sexes in the buff on his HBO show.
The series finale showed naked Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) entering the mysterious machine that sent her either somewhere or nowhere, but earlier in the series we saw full frontal nudity from Christopher Eccleston's Matt Jamison, Chris Zylka's Tom Garvey, and that naked French guy running through the submarine. All of that was purposefully done, Lindelof said, to try and level the playing field in a world where female nudity is normalized, and male nudity is still seen as something shocking. As Lindelof told TVLine:
"There's an incredible disproportion between naked women and naked men on television. And if you're going to do a show on HBO, which is one of the few places where you can do full frontal nudity, there's no excuse not to show more dongs. I'm passionate about it.
The audience still has a very odd reaction to seeing male genitalia. Yet when they see female genitalia or naked breasts, they're completely nonchalant about it. [So] I'm just the beginning of the vanguard, but I want to normalize male nudity on television."
Well, we all need a cause. This is a subject that has come up on "Game of Thrones" a few times, when HBO viewers noted the many more female nude scenes vs. male. But if you're wondering why the main character of "The Leftovers," Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), showed everything but his little Kevin, Lindelof said Theroux wanted to "leave something to the imagination." Not that there was much left after fans ogled Kevin jogging in those sweatpants.
There's really no need for nudity on most shows, network or cable, but if it happens to make sense for the story, it probably makes sense for both sexes, unless you're writing about a world where only one gender ever takes off their clothes. (Maybe they're "Lost," which aired on ABC, but now we have to wonder how much more, um, revealing it would've been on HBO.
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