Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy: Pretty Boy Eddie Redmayne Makes One Very Pretty 'Danish Girl'

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 week, Eddie Redmayne proves he's the prettiest of them all when he morphs into The Danish Girl!

Last December, the world watched in abject horror as Academy Award winning director Tom Hooper unleashed his film version of Cats upon the world. In the span of a decade, he went from being the guy who beat David Fincher, The Coen Brothers, Darren Aronofsky, and David O. Russell for the Best Director Oscar, to creating one of the most objectively awful films ever made. The signs were there long before Cats, however, that Hooper just wasn't a very good director, and the first cracks in the façade came with his woefully miscalculated 2015 effort The Danish Girl.

The Danish Girl tells the story of Lili Elbe, who begins the film as landscape artist Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), husband to successful portrait artist Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) in early 20th century Copenhagen. When a female model stands Gerda up on the day she is to complete her latest portrait, she asks Einar to stand in for the model, bringing Einar's gender-identity issues to the forefront of his mind. Einar realizes that he has spent his life hiding his true identity as a woman and, with his wife's help, determines to live his life truthfully.

There are two things we need to get out of the way before we continue. First, the title of the film does not, in fact, refer to Einar/Lili, but rather Gerda. Second, and more importantly, the film is riddled with historical inaccuracies. A substantial portion of the film's Wikipedia page is devoted to these inaccuracies, which you can read in the screenshot below...

The film itself is based on the 2000 book of the same name by out author David Ebershoff, who heavily fictionalized the story to the point where he himself has dubbed it speculative fiction, rather than historically accurate. This claim was missing from nearly every bit of publicity surrounding the film, which attempted to portray its events as being much closer to the truth than its author intended. When the film version of the book first began its journey to the screen in the mid-aughts, Nicole Kidman was attached to play Einar/Lili. She remained attached for nearly a decade as the film went through several directors, but when Hooper came aboard, he announced that Eddie Redmayne would be playing the role.

To his credit, Redmayne has since said that, in retrospect, he probably would have turned the role down, but nonetheless, he's the star and does just about the best he can as a cis-gendered male. His casting seems rather obvious in retrospect as he was on the brink of winning an Oscar for his role in The Theory of Everything, and was becoming one of the it-actors of the moment. He's also exceedingly pretty, to the point where his soft features almost invite skeptics to decry his casting.

No matter how pretty he is, though, he's still a straight male attempting to portray an inner turmoil he can't possibly grasp to its fullest extent. Perhaps his greatest advantage in winning the role, beyond his feminine features, is the fact that he has a penis. This allowed Hooper to rest securely in the knowledge that when he shot the scene below—in which Einar imagines himself penis-less—he was bringing great verisimilitude to the proceedings...

Is this scene really any better than Buffalo Bill's "would you fuck me?" scene from Silence of the Lambs, shot 24 years earlier? Is it any less exploitative of the struggles of actual transgendered people? It's difficult to say and very worthy of discussion. Silence of the Lambs goes out of its way to make sure the audience knows that Buffalo Bill is mentally damaged and does not deserve to be lumped into a category with actual transgendered people like Lili Elbe. Where the aforementioned scene from that film served to further display that separation, The Danish Girl instead attempts to play this scene as a glorious moment of triumph.

Look, the filmmakers' hearts were in the right place when they attempted to tell this vitally important story about the history of transgender people. However, good intentions alone do not a good film make, and when artistic license vastly outweighs the amount of accuracy in a biopic, it's probably time to reconsider everything about the project. Stories like this need to be told, but they also need to be told properly, with actual transgendered people being an integral part of the process.

As much as I love Ben Whishaw, he's the only representative of the gay community among the main cast, and thus becomes something of a mascot for the rest of the creative team to point toward, turning him into the dreaded "diversity hire." That wasn't the filmmakers' intent, I'm sure, but it's a damning side effect of the way movies are made today. Yes, Lili Elbe's story deserved to be told, but more importantly, it deserved to be told by those who have experienced the same struggles with which she herself wrestled. It's no better than a white filmmaker deciding that they are the one to tell the history of the Black Panther movement, because no matter how well-informed that hypothetical director may be, they're still an insider looking out.

Catch up with our other editions of Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy...

Two of History's Manliest Men Wrestle Naked in Women in Love

Ewan McGregor Has Got It, Flaunts It in Velvet Goldmine

A Pair of Stars are Born in Y Tu Mamá También

Harvey Keitel Goes Hog Wild in Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant

Viggo Mortensen is Naked From Every Imaginable Angle in Eastern Promises

There's No Shame is Michael Fassbender's Dick Game

Kevin Bacon Steals the Show Going Full Frontal in Wild Things

How We Met Jason Segel's Dick in Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Jack Reynor is Uniquely Vulnerable for a Man in Midsommar

Jaye Davidson Knows All There is to Know About The Crying Game

David Bowie Battles Rip Torn for Dick Supremacy in The Man Who Fell to Earth

Al Pacino Doesn't Get In All That Deep for William Friedkin's Cruising

John Cameron Mitchell's Ass Gives Hedwig and the Angry Inch the Perfect Ending

Ross Lynch Makes One Sexy Future Serial Killer in My Friend Dahmer

Rocketman Not-So-Boldly Goes Where Bohemian Rhapsody Refused

Color of Night Brings Us the Return of Bruno's Dick

Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu Get Serviced in Bertolucci's 1900

Future Oscar Winner Mark Rylance Gets Real and Really Nude in Intimacy

Louis Garrel Lets It All Hang Out in the French New Wave Biopic Godard Mon Amour

Bronson Makes Tom Hardy and His Uncut Cock a Star

Henry June Ushers in the NC-17 Rating with a Distinct Lack of Parity in Nudity

The Gay Cowboys of Brokeback Mountain Do More Than Eat Pudding