In a scene from the 2024 series Earth Abides, Alexander Ludwig slowly undresses. The narrative pauses, the camera holds an inverted full shot, a peekaboo framing that film has usually reserved for women.
The original dark ground is kept. It reads as flat space and infinite space at once. This simultaneous compression and extension produces ambiguity, and with it, unease.
The natural color of the darkened shot is heightened into a palette reminiscent of Matisse's Blue Nude. The questions asked of Matisse apply here: is this a new understanding of beauty, or a distortion of the human form?
The collages extend the 3-second shot with multiple views of the scene, combined, inverted, overlaid, and repeated, to ask the question: if this scene had been filmed for a male audience instead of a female one, would it have been called inappropriate?
Other questions follow. How does this scene serve the narrative? Viewers interested in Ludwig capture the moment and repost it, which drives views and revenue for the series. Is the scene only about money?
Compare the nude bathing scene in the 2021 film The Power of the Dog. That film drew criticism, including from actor Sam Elliott, for its homoerotic content. Ludwig's slow strip passed without apparent objection. The only difference is the implied audience, women for one, men for the other.
This returns to the long debate over the naked and the nude. What counts as appropriate is often decided by the intention behind an image, not the image itself. That judgment usually rests on one assumption: heterosexual attraction is acceptable, homosexual attraction is not.
The objection, then, is not to the nude body. It is to LGBTQ+ people.