The nakedest, lengthiest bondage scene on basic cable TV (Saving Grace)

Cafe Society
1

So, for at least the first ten minutes of Monday Night’s showing of Saving Grace, Holly Hunter is tied naked and face down on a bed, in an upper spreadeagle, her ankles tied together. Nice. With a happy face on her back. Also nice. It’s the typical “boyfriend leaves after consensual bondage sex” scene. Most such scenes are really chintzy on the nudity and the bondage, but not this one. A couple of people drop by, and are in no hurry to untie Holly. Nice. We get to see her butt. Very nice.

Frankly, the scene made Sheryl Lee’s very similar scene (in terms of pose) on John Carpenter’s “Vampires” look prudish by comparison. For an example of a similar scene in a movie that makes the Saving Grace scene look prudish, think “Spun.”

My VCR screwed up after recording the first ten minutes of the show, so I don’t know what came after that … in fact, the bondage scene was still going when the VCR screwed up. Nice.

Will this usher in a new era of moral decadence and nude bondage scenes on TV? I certainly hope so! But somehow, I doubt it.

2

It’s a treat to get this level of analysis from a true opinion-former of the genre. Little technical insights like ‘upper spreadeagle’ really add a touch of class to the commentary.

I thought about old dirty bastard as a usrname when I signed up, but wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. You, on the other hand…

3

Do you honestly believe that in any way? Seriously now, I know you’re the man who speaks for the man who can’t speak because he has a ballgag in his mouth, but come on.

Although your post did remind me of a great quote from Roger Ebert about Vampires (from memory, so it’s probably pretty mangled): “I think it’s despicable to treat a woman the way they treated Sheryl Lee’s character. But she’s a vampire and she deserves what she gets.”

4

I saw Denis Leary’s character fantasizing about having a woman bent over the sink in a public restroom the other day. I think it’s becoming mainstream to push the envelope with regard to kinky sex. Move along…there’s nothing to see here.

5

Yes, I can no longer shock people in real life. Oh well, we all had to grow up sometime.

I am sure TV will follow and reflect that.

6

And it’s not even sweeps month yet!

7

Man, I am getting a big old boner here. We are talking serious mahogony!

8

So I take it was good for you padre?

9

Softcore granny bondage pushes social boundaries I guess, for the five people that get into it.

10

Eh, bondage. Never could see the big deal about it, or understand the appeal.

Hey now, Holly Hunter is no spring chicken, but she’s hardly a granny, either. I would agree that the rising amount of what is supposed to be “kinky” sex I’ve noticed on TV recently fits another pattern I’ve noticed. TV producers always throw in more of what they think will shock Middle America when they’re desperate for attention/ratings. Remember how all the pointless sex and nudity disappeared from NYPD Blue after it had an established audience?

11

At the same time? Man, she must have REALLY spread 'em! :eek:

12

Yeah, but the Superbowl “nipplegate” episode scared all the networks silly, and that didn’t help. I guess they’re starting to get over it.

13

Are you deliberately being obtuse? Of course the first statement was hyperbole.

I thought the despicable treatment was an intentional commentary on the character of Jack and whoever it was the Baldwin guy was playing. They’re not nice guys, they’re basically mercs hired to kill vampires. Remember when the Baldwin guy was sayin they should just “Kill the whore and burn the place”? Even less nice than tying her up. Their real problem was that they regarded whores as subhuman, which is indeed despicable – they were willing to buy whores drinks and fuck them, but they obviously didn’t care about them as human beings. They were willing to let the vampire virus or whatever take over Sheryl Lee so they could use her as a human compass to find the chief vampire. Very not-nice behavior, especially given that they knew that the very likely outcome would be that they’d have to kill her once she got fully vampirized.

The vampirism OTOH was a legitimate concern. They were afraid she’d turn into a full vampire at any moment and start trying to drink their blood. They had good reason to want to restrain her in some way. Of course, the bondage was amazingly inconsistent in its application, on again, off again with no apparent link to her likelihood of going all vampire. But that’s par for the course with mainstream bondage scenes.

14

I disagree, at least with respect to bondage. This scene is WELL past anything that has gone before.

The closest analogue to it from TV that I know of is the nude bondage scene in an episode of Law and Order in which a woman is found naked, bound and gagged in an office after a workplace rape. It was very brief scene, lasting not more than 5 or 6 seconds, and didn’t show us much of the woman’s body.

Even movies don’t always match it. Frex, in “Birthday Girl” you have Nicole Kidman tied to a bed face down and naked, but she’s only from face on through the headboard, and in a very narrow focal range, which means her face was sharp and clearly defined, but her buttcheeks were just two round blobs behind her. (See the Jennifer Anniston “nude” cover of Rolling Stone for a similar effect.)

And that was in an R-rated movie.

Very often, when bondage scenes occur on TV, they are dimly lit, sometimes extremely so. The classic example was a scene of a woman bound in bra and panties by a serial killer in some defunct cop series or other. She was kept in a hidden room near a bathroom, and the few scenes you saw to establish that she was actually there, and that she had been rescued, were so dark that you literally could not make out the woman’s features or in fact any details other than the outlines of her body. You had to take the script’s word for everything, because you could see virtually nothing.

Of course, a serial killer might really keep a prospective victim in a really dark place, but that doesn’t work dramatically because instead of going, “Oh, she’s very helpless and vulnerable and in great danger!” you go “what is that? Is something moving? I can’t see a thing!”

The scene in Saving Grace was very well lit, lengthy, we got lots of images of it (Hunter’s butt was in fact intrinsic to the plot, due to what was written on her buttcheeks) and was very, very lengthy.

There’s been nothing like it on broadcast TV. Ever. Hell, damn few mainstream movies with an R rating can match it or surpass it. If I were plotting it as a data point on a graph about the length, nudity and so forth of bondage images on TV, it’d be way out on one end of the graph without a lot of other dots (probably none) anywhere near it.

So, no, I don’t think it’s a typical example of bondage imagery on TV. And I’ve seen a lot of it.

15

Because it’s fun!
oops. did I say that in my out loud voice?

16

Good point. And TNT, being a cable channel rather than a broadcast channel, has a little more leeway in this regard than broadcast networks. I guess E! would be the leader here. They put the nudity taboo a lot.

17

You guys need the Uk’s Channel 4, the sauciest non-subscription channel on earth. If it’s called art and has tits in it it’ll be on Channel 4. :slight_smile:

18

Actually, Hunter’s ankles were cuffed together, making spreading them difficult, much less REALLY spreading them. I’m sure that’s because it would have been hard to film the scene as it was without revealing something that would REALLY push the envelope, if her ankles had been tied wide apart.

19

Awesome. Rape as entertainment, going mainstream! It’s a goddamn beautiful world!

20

Many people don’t. Most bondage scenes on TV are for dramatic reasons, not sexual, but they often have a sexual subtext, because even if you’re not ‘into’ bondage you still respond to the helplessness and vulnerabilty of a bound person of the opposite sex (or the same sex, if that’s your orientation) on a subconscious basis, if not a conscious basis.

It’s a fairly common stratagem, and has been for decades. Very often an action or a cop series will go for years without a bondage scene of any kind, or just a few, then when ratings drop, the bondage scenes increase. It’s the action/adventure equivalent of having a female character have a baby in a sitcom, or get married or whatever. A proven ratins booster. Nudity works the same, only more so, since most viewers react to it in a less subconscious manner.