The Value of Nudity: Considering The Saboteur

I sometimes wonder if the Hayes Code and the FCC has led us to believe that sex never occurred before the advent of color. Much like the film Pleasantville, Pandemic’s new game The Saboteur leans on the conceit of liberation being represented by transforming a black and white world into color. More specifically and also much like Pleasantville liberation is marked initially by sexual freedom being the most obvious form of liberation.

The game’s opening sequence represents this concept visually as the player is greeted by a bare chested woman in black and white whose darkened form is slowly lit by the glare of stage lights and the camera pans back to takes in her whole hip swinging burlesque performance at La Belle Nuit. Behind her emerges a backdrop featuring a fully colorized Paris cityscape. It is, after all, the City of Lights.

The camera continues to pan back revealing a group of drunken Nazis enjoying the view, who are interestingly the only Nazis in the game not programmed to respond with suspicion to Sean Devlin’s (the game’s protagonist) any deviance from normative behavior while on the Paris streets (like climbing a building, drawing a weapon, or lighting a stick of dynamite). Devlin himself is revealed at the bar and the player is quickly immersed in the first mission of the game, whose goal is to light up and colorize the currently black and white Paris streets by liberating the city from Nazi oppression.

That La Belle Nuit is in the first neighborhood that is colorized, the red-light district, is telegraphed by the stage performance. The Parisian heart apparently beats to the sexual freedom embraced in its bordellos and strip clubs. Later missions will also serve to free areas of the city associated with French culture and more traditional arts (like freeing the neighborhoods containing the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower or stopping a book burning occurring beneath the Arc de Triomphe), but the freedom of expression that Nazi rule would stamp out ostensibly begins with this most basic expression of a liberated libido.

However, the game does not necessarily begin as described if the player has not purchased a copy of the game and downloaded a free add-on to the game called “The Midnight Club” or rented a copy of the Xbox version (for example) and purchased this addition to the game for 240 MS points (about $3.00). A player loading up The Saboteur without the “Nudity” feature on will instead be witness to the same scene, but the stripper will be just barely clad in pasties, which in and of itself seems to have little bearing on the implications of the sequence that I have described above, particularly in terms of the game’s themes and those themes’ relation to the game play. Additionally, though, a room in La Belle Nuit will be missing, an underground speakeasy featuring additional burlesque dances and a game that allows the player to unlock an additional pimped out ride for the game.

Now I realize that breasts can sell a product, but “The Midnight Club” is an interesting way of selling product as it depends on such a prurient interest on the player’s part in an interesting way. The literal value of “The Midnight Club” is contingent in part on the permanency of ownership. As I see it, as a marketing device, “The Midnight Club” download suggests a different value than the one implied by the opening cut scene’s thematic purposes. Indeed, rather than liberate the player, it encourages a very specific action based on the player’s own libidinous propensities: purchase of the game, especially a new copy of the game.

While one could certainly rent and play The Saboteur and still get the vibe of the game, it seems unlikely that most players interested in the nude sequences are likely to want to purchase a download online if they intend to later turn the game back in to the video store. Though $3.00 might be the value of temporary virtual nipples (assumedly one would drop a little more on real ones at a real club?). However, it is probably a cost that is close to doubling the cost of the rental itself.

Alternately, players looking for a copy of the game on the cheap could purchase it used, but since the code that ships with the game will only allow for a download to a single console itself (and assuming the original owner of the game would have wanted to see pixelated nipples), any used version of the game will be lacking the free version. Thus, once again the value of nudity is a few bucks more. Making this purchase for $3.00 more sensible practically since the content would be relevant throughout ownership of the disk, but it still might be easier to simply buy the game outright, newly packaged with fresh, free nudity.

It seems to me then that “The Midnight Club” rather than being a download intended to make some additional money on the basis of fans willing to purchase a game (as most downloadable content seems to exist for the purposes of gathering “a few dollars more”) that instead it might intend to serve as one of the primary basis for sales (as opposed to rentals) to begin with. It seems an interesting gambit to maximize copies that go directly to the player as a single serve game rather than sitting on the shelf of some video store to be pawed at promiscuously by a heap of players whose money is being thrown at the rental agency rather than at the publisher and developer.

If such thinking was part of the thinking about the distribution model for “The Midnight Club” (and certainly the club could simply have been included on the disk without the histrionics necessary for downloading the content if the only thought was to protect people from questionable content that they didn’t necessarily want — the club can be turned off in the Options menu simply by selecting Nudity to off), it does raise questions about the thematic or narrative necessity for these sequences at all in The Saboteur. If the nudity is at all essential to telling the story, shouldn’t it already be there? Doesn’t this inclusion suggest pure gratuitousness? Or, does the fact that the pasties covering these characters act to only narrowly alter what is going on in the scene suggest that the scene’s message can be clearly conveyed with obscured nipples or covered up nipples? What purpose then does nudity serve in telling a story?

I recently watched a documentary called Sex and the Cinema in which a variety of directors discussed the purpose of gratuitous sex scenes in movies, suggesting that the best sex scenes serve the additional purpose of speaking to the characters relationships and identities in the story (ironically, I had also just watched Desperado again and had been thinking how the gun fight that follows the sex scene in that film actually speaks more about the relationship between that film’s main characters — all the pushing and shoving and stepping protectively in front of one another done by Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas speak more clearly to how they feel about one another then the dialogue or sexuality in the film — nevertheless, like a sex scene all of this information is communicated by seeing it visually through the bodies of the characters). If sexuality and sexual images speak in any way to the themes of The Saboteur is the nudity necessary to understand those themes? If so, are those themes compromised by this sales technique? It would be interesting to know how the developers feel about the marketing of the game and whether or not it “obscures” their sense of the usefulness or mere gratuity of the scene.

Assuming there is any merit to understanding La Belle Nuit as an expression of the spirit of liberation in the wake of the “colorlessness” of oppression, one way or the other the metanarrative of the game complicates the message of the narrative. The libertine theme is confused by a marketing campaign depending on a sense that restricted sexual imagery can pay off in the short term at least.