You can cut that man's brain out, but don't you dare feed that baby, lady!

Here's something I really can't understand. A few years ago there was a remake of 13 Ghosts, cleverly titled Thir13en Ghosts in some sort of homage to 1337 5p34k, starring Tony Shalhoub, Matthew Lillard, and Antonio Salieri. Since nobody I know will have seen it (nor should they) I'll give a brief synopsis: Tony Shalhoub loses his wife, their home, and all his worldly possessions in a fire, and is barely holding his family together when his rich eccentric uncle (Antonio Salieri) dies and leaves him a weird glass house to live in. Unfortunately, his uncle and drooling psychic Matthew Lillard trapped 12 pissed off ghosts in the house, who by both the nature of their lives and their violent deaths, form the Black Zodiac, and there's a nefarious purpose to gathering all these people, living and dead, in the house. There are twelve poetic names for each of the roles these ghosts fill, and each one has a horrifying appearance and funky back story, but my confusion centers around one, The Angry Princess.

The ghost is that of a beautiful young woman who was obsessed with fixing imaginary physical flaws, and addicted to cosmetic surgery. After disfiguring herself in one of her surgeries, she commits suicide in a bathtub by repeatedly slashing herself with a butcher knife. It's pretty horrific, and her ghost is that same disfigured corpse straight out of the tub, completely naked and covered in open slash wounds, carrying a huge knife. She has a long scene in a bathroom with Shannon Elizabeth (who is unable to see her) in which the Angry Princess keeps lurking naked and bloody around a blood-spattered bathroom, eventually reclining in a bathtub full of bloody water, with a message written on the floor in her own blood.

More graphic is one of her first appearances in the film is when she is first released and stalks this suit down a hallway to kill him. He backs away from this buck naked, slowly advancing woman with a knife until he walks into a doorway and a pair of sliding glass doors close on him, cutting him in half, and then she watches as the front half of his body slides down the glass, leaving a bloody exposed cross-section of his brain and eye sockets stuck to the other side of the glass. It's okay, because we knew he was evil when he showed up in a suit, and he did release the ghosts and tauntingly say “Nice tits” to the naked ghost. Never comment on a ghost's breasts, you know that's not going anywhere good.

My confusion is this: when I recently caught the film again on television, I assumed some things surrounding the Angry Princess would be cut down a bit, but as far as I could tell, there were only two. In the edited for television version, the Angry Princess has no nipples. Particularly, the guy getting cut in half is there in all its glory, quivering gray brain and all, just the nipples are gone. They weren't blurred, the shots weren't carefully cropped to avoid showing anything, and her naked breasts were still on full display, this woman just didn't have any nipples. It was possible because the actress is wearing a latex suit to simulate her character's cut-up body, and so they shot one with and one without nipples. This is very confusing because basically everybody I've ever seen naked has actually had nipples. Even I have nipples, I'm not ashamed to admit it. And she's seriously still naked, so this implies that some exec believes there is an audience out there who would have a serious problem with a naked woman appearing in the film, but wouldn't notice she was naked if they didn't actually see her nipples. Has nudity become that specialized?

Her character is already highly sexual and shown clearly naked, so there's still the same amount of sexualized violence, which is the only logical reason to allow violence but shy away from nudity. The only real change is that now the audience is reassured that white she may be naked and bloody, we can all relax because she will not be nursing any infants during the course of the film. Which is good, because that would actually be pretty disturbing. But seriously, if you're too young or sensitive for nipples, the rest of this film should have been too much for you as well. I think it was Roger Ebert who said that with an R rating you can show a breast, but the only thing you're allowed to touch it with is a chainsaw. It's really disturbing how that puritanical instinct is so increasingly divorced from reflection, and born out of the momentary emotional, visual stimulus, where the context isn't seen, even the woman isn't seen, only the nipple is seen, and oh god why is there a nipple on TV??? Morality through emotional response has always been with us, justifying lynchings because it certainly feels like there's a rapist on the loose when you light up the torches, the fascist motto of thinking with one's blood, or diagnosing a coma patient from a videotape and doing what feels right, but this is just bizarre. Within the context of the film, the logical implication is that this woman has removed her own nipples as part of her beautification, and good lord is that more disturbing than leaving them on would have been. Seriously, if you take away the nipples this becomes family entertainment for a family not named Borgia?

You may wonder whether this really does any harm and why I'm so irritated by two missing nipples that I've already seen in the unedited version, but I have to wonder what this does to the target audience's sense of what a woman's body is, because of some of the particulars of this character. She's supposed to be somebody whose unhealthy self-image drove her to disfigure her own body, so she has these exaggerated features like giant duck bill lips and fake breasts, and now no nipples, but that's the only naked woman being shown on basic cable. I still can never quite get my head around the fact that all the women I've been with were so distinct from each other, that even years later I'd have no trouble identifying them all from the neck down in a line-up, yet whenever there's more marketing than art involved, the women all look the same, whether it's selling lap dances or women's running shoes, which are theoretically different markets.

It's also irritating because it happens in more serious films than this. Thir13en Ghosts is already silly before the nipples come off, but the last time I caught The Shining on television, it just reinforced how much the audience needed to grow up. When Jack enters Room 237, a naked woman gets out of the bathtub and embraces him. While kissing her he sees in the mirror that her body has turned into an old rotting corpse, his arousal turns to revulsion, and he flees the scene in horror. It's a disturbing scene, manipulating sexual arousal and fear, and there's no way anybody who's uncomfortable with a naked woman should be comfortable with anything in that scene or a lot of the rest of that film. The pixelated bars across her body do puncture the directness of it sexuality, and the growing dread that permeates the scene and the film, like a paternalistic hand on the shoulder trying to remind you that you aren't supposed to want to look, even when Kubrick actually went out and shot that scene for a reason. One of my other favorites I've seen on TV is not a horror film, but is definitely a film nobody without an adult sense of their own sexuality should see, because it's got such very challenging and unhealthy images of sex in it. I saw Breaking the Waves was on Lifetime or Oxygen or one of the estrogen-supplement networks, but blurred out big swaths of Emily Watson. She spends half of that movie looking for strangers to have sex with so she can describe it to her immobilized husband, and is severely beaten and raped a couple times as a result. The early scene of her getting blood on her wedding dress having sex with her husband in the bathroom at the reception is already too much for most movies, and requires no blurring. I really was stunned though that “television for women” is afraid to show women to other women. Do their viewers have to close their eyes doing a self-examination for breast cancer or inserting tampons? They can say, “Yeah but some kid flipping through channels might come across it,” meaning a boy, but no kid of any gender should be watching a Lars von Trier movie until they grow up, even if the women were wearing full veils.

So in essence this is American television: a guy manipulating his wife into prostitution is okay, exposed brains never hurt anyone, but for god's sake put away those boobies, it's bad enough that girls can look at their own at home! Actually, the half of our society that can be prevented from the soothing, maternal sight of a naked breast is also the half that commits most of the violent crimes. Coincidence? Okay yeah, probably, but I still think “Show Breasts not Brains” should be my new bumper sticker slogan.