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Watchable bodies: Salo's young non-actors

2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/screen/hjs050

1460-2474

John David Rhodes,

South Asian Cinema and Culture

Dozens of teenage ‘boys’ are gathered together in the giant hall of an apparently disused building. They are arranged in rows, military style. A group of older men – middle aged, bourgeois, dressed for winter in heavy coats – arrive and begin to inspect the boys. Some boys are favoured over others. Those favoured are asked to undress, so as to reveal the nature and dimensions of their naked bodies. The boys comply, with somewhat surprising willingness. Their bodies are appraised in silence, the men pass on, the boys raise their trousers and lower their shirts to cover themselves again. These scenes, perhaps, are familiar enough to people working in the movie business. Dropping one's trousers is surely required in auditions for the porn film industry; removing one's clothes may even be required to land certain ‘R’-rated roles in Hollywood. The inspection and judgement of teenage bodies – adolescent, pubescent, but still unmistakably non-adult – is something stranger. Did the auditions for Pretty Baby (Louis Malle, 1978) or The Blue Lagoon (Randal Kleiser, 1980) look anything like this?