Throughout cinema history, there have been some iconic nude scenes that have transcended the bounds of the films in which they appeared. Our weekly column Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy will take an in-depth look at these scenes, their history, their deeper meanings, and their legacy.
This October, we're offering up some seasonally appropriate chills and thrills—along with our patented spills—with a month of horror movies that bring more male nudity to the table than their contemporaries! This week, we close out this spooktacular month with Kevin Bacon's invisible dick in Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man!
Director Paul Verhoeven's career in Hollywood came to a rather abrupt end with the release of Hollow Man in 2000. The Dutch master had just gone on a 15 year run in America that saw him direct blockbusters like Robocop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct, but the one-two box office disappointment punch of Showgirls and Starship Troopers had sullied his reputation. In fact, it had also turned Verhoeven off to the notion of couching satire within an event film, as he himself was upset by the fact that American audiences in particular had taken those two films a touch too literally.
With his career on the ropes, Verhoeven decided that for his next film, he wanted something more conventional, more in line with the films tearing up the box office here in the States. This drove him, for the first time, to direct a script he didn't personally help develop, which may account for why Hollow Man doesn't feel much like a Paul Verhoeven movie. However, even with that caveat, Verhoeven is far from phoning it in on this one, fully storyboarding the film in advance of shooting and earmarking $50 million of the film's $95 million production budget just for visual effects.
20 years after its release, the visual effects still hold up remarkably well and are just about the only positive element of the entire film. However, the film's story and lead character are insanely problematic two decades on and only seem more troublesome given that the film more or less sides the audience with the ultimate toxic male. Which brings us to star Kevin Bacon, who really does pour his full self into this performance, to the point where he makes the viewer uncomfortable over how much he relishes his villainy.
Bacon stars as Dr. Sebastian Caine, an arrogant blowhard of a scientist who has been developing an invisibility serum for the United States Military. After several unsuccessful attempts to turn various animals invisible, Sebastian decides to proceed with human trials—without informing the government—by using himself as the first human guinea pig. Wasting no time getting his main character invisible, Verhoeven cues up the scientific experiment right at the thirty minute mark, leaving roughly 90 minutes of the film for various invisible man shenanigans.
Bacon strips completely nude and gets injected with the serum, which causes him to writhe about in pain, letting his dick slip into the shot a bunch of times...
If you're interested in seeing the rest of the scene, this YouTube clip more or less picks up where our clip leaves off, showing the visual effects work in more detail. From here Sebastian, who was already a pretty big prick prior to becoming invisible, finds that the serum has started to slowly erode his own moral compass. It isn't long before he sexually assaults his neighbor, played by Rhona Mitra, and eventually begins killing off members of his own team.
What attracted Verhoeven to the material in the first place was the notion of an audience being on the side of a character through most of a film's first half, only to discover they've been rooting for the villain all along. Unfortunately for Verhoeven, Hollow Man can't quite successfully pull off this trick—Christopher Nolan's The Prestige would do this much better six years later. In his 2005 book about Verhoeven's life and work, author Douglas Keesey published a quote from the director about how he had hoped the film would play for audiences...
"Hollow Man leads you by the hand and takes you with Sebastian into teasing behaviour, naughty behaviour and then really bad and ultimately evil behaviour. At what point do you abandon him? I'm thinking when he [assaults] the woman would probably be the moment that people decide, 'This is not exactly my type of hero', though I must say a lot of viewers follow him further than you would expect."
That last statement is probably the truest testament to why Hollow Man just doesn't work as a film. It almost demands that the audience root for Sebastian despite all of his off-putting character traits that make him less than sympathetic from the jump. Certainly some audience members were willing to go along with Sebastian until the bitter end, as the film's assault scene was initially much longer, but was cut down severely by Verhoeven after the audience turned on him at this point in time. The fact that he had to basically lessen the impact of the scene so as not to lose most of the audience is testament alone to how precarious the tightrope walk was that Verhoeven attempted.
Hollow Man remains the true outlier among Verhoeven's Hollywood films. Even the box office bombs like Showgirls and Starship Troopers were eventually recognized for the satirical masterworks they always were, but no such reappraisal of Hollow Man is likely to ever happen. Unlike those other Verhoeven disappointments, Hollow Man actually broke even at the worldwide box office, which is probably why folks aren't eager to revisit the film in any way.
In light of the recent Universal reboot of The Invisible Man, however, it might be worth revisiting Hollow Man as part of a double feature with that film. They both explore nearly identical themes of toxic masculinity and gaslighting of the female characters, but the more recent film is a stunning success in this realm whereas Hollow Man just kinda half-commits to all those themes before becoming a by-the-numbers cat and mouse thriller. Verhoeven was clearly on to something here, but it just didn't come together in the way he had hoped. At least we'll always have Kevin Bacon's non-kosher delicacy to keep us company!
Catch up with our Spooky Horror Editions of Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy...
—Malcolm McDowell in Cat People
—Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later
—David Naughton in An American Werewolf in London
Catch up with ALL of our other editions of Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy...
—Oliver Reed Alan Bates in Women in Love
—Ewan McGregor in Velvet Goldmine
—A Pair of Stars are Born in Y Tu Mamá También
—Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant
—Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises
—Jason Segel in Forgetting Sarah Marshall
—Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game
—David Bowie Rip Torn in The Man Who Fell to Earth
—John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch
—Ross Lynch in My Friend Dahmer
—Rocketman vs. Bohemian Rhapsody
—Bruce Willis in Color of Night
—Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu in Bertolucci's 1900
—Louis Garrel in Godard Mon Amour
—Henry June and the NC-17 Rating
—The Gay Cowboys of Brokeback Mountain
—Eddie Redmayne in Danish Girl
—Tom Cruise in All the Right Moves
—Christopher Atkins in The Blue Lagoon
—Sylvester Stallone in The Italian Stallion
—9 Songs Combines Real Music with Real Sex
—The Naked Men of A Room with a View
—John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus
—Ben Affleck's Abnormally Smooth Dick in Gone Girl
—Joseph Gordon-Levitt inMysterious Skin
—Will Smith in Six Degrees of Separation
—Richard Gere in American Gigolo
—Ralph Fiennes and Matthias Schoenaerts in A Bigger Splash
