If you read my last blog entry, you know I have been engaging in seasonal viewing--more vampire movies, Transylvania travelogues, and horror films than you can shake a stick at. (And let's not even get into the fourteen hours' worth of ghost hunting shows I have left. I don't really want to watch them--they drive me mad. The entire show always consists of night vision footage of someone shrieking, "Did you hear that?!" Unfortunately, they also lead in with a fair amount of background, and I never know when something is going to prove exceedingly useful for the next book.)
As an antidote to all the Halloween horror, I watched "Arabesque" with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren. If you haven't seen it, just ponder the implications for a minute. Gregory Peck, all cool savoir faire, and Sophia Loren, who could smolder while sitting on an iceberg. There is one particularly delicious scene in which a fully dressed, tweedy Peck is hiding out in her shower. She doesn't want to give away his presence to her jealous crime-lord boyfriend who is lurking just outside, but neither does she want to provide a floor show. She has no choice but to climb into the shower unclad, keeping her back decorously turned to her guest.
Until she drops the soap. Naturally, she doesn't want to retrieve it herself, and Gregory Peck isn't about to help her. He simply stands back, smiling and letting himself get drenched with shower spray--fatal for his tweeds--while she reaches back with one shapely foot to search for her soap. We never see a hint of anything above her knee, and yet we can tell from the smile on Gregory Peck's face that he is seeing plenty. It's a tease, perfectly rendered.
The scene actually reveals very little, but what it conjures in our imagination could go on for days. I imagine if that scene were shot today, it would involve some full frontal nudity and a nice "R" rating to go along with it, and we would be the poorer for it. Why, I wonder, have so many filmmakers and artists and writers forgotten the delicious art of the tease? When a little something is left out, the viewer or reader is forced to fill in a few blanks. They become part of the creative process instead of just a bystander. Surely it's no accident that the art of burlesque began its revival after it became de rigueur for strippers to bare everything in painfully gynecological poses? Dita von Teese has created an entire career based upon the notion that what you think you see is often far sexier than what you're actually watching. Mata Hari never danced topless, and yet hers is a name to conjure with, evoking ideas of shimmering seduction a hundred years after she waved her perfumed veils. The greatest courtesans in Europe--a subject for another book I plan to write--knew that creating an image was far more important than reality, a principle that today's pantyless Hollywood starlets seem to have forgotten. Baring the edge of a lace stocking will always be far more inflaming than forgetting your knickers altogether.
This lesson hit home for me when I started to get reader mail about my first book. I expected the intense moment on Hampstead Heath would generate the most interest, but it didn't. Instead, it was the glove scene that seemed to do them in. Women have come up to me at booksignings, pink and a little breathless, describing that scene as their favorite. (If you're not familiar, the male character simply slips his finger into the glove of the female, stroking her palm. Seriously, that is ALL.) At first I chalked it up to the obvious literary metaphors. (Anyone with an English degree can find phallic imagery in a Hallmark card.) And it was a literary metaphor, by design. I knew this couple would not have a physical relationship in the course of the book, but I wanted to ramp up the sexual tension between them.
What I didn't expect was that this little tease would titillate readers as much as if I had given them a play-by-play of what happened behind the bedroom door. In fact, in some cases, I think it was actually more effective, at least that's what I've come to believe after the requests I've had to "put another glove scene" into the second book. And that brings me to the most surprising thing I've learned: readers like to work for it. It reminds me of the time I sat in a darkened theatre watching a re-release of "Rear Window". Three hundred people, most of whom had probably already seen the film, all jumped and shrieked at the same time, not because of what we saw, but because of what we didn't see. Personally, my own imagination can create something far more gruesome than a skinned Mrs. Thorwald hanging from the shower rail, and Hitchcock knew that. He forced his audience to craft a terrible fate for poor Mrs. Thorwald, and we did, happily. (And think of the shark in "Jaws". It doesn't even appear on-screen for the first half of the movie, but the glimpses of it were so horrifying, I still get a tiny shiver when I step onto the deck of a boat.)
Why, then, do we tell all? Show all? Hercule Poirot once complained about seeing girls parading around in bathing suits because it left nothing to the imagination. He rhapsodized about the days of his Victorian youth when a glimpse of an elegant ankle under a lacy petticoat was enough to get the pulses racing. I think he was onto something. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a return to corsets and parasols--although both have their uses and more of us could benefit from them than not. (In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I own both and therefore my perception is likely to be wildly skewed.) Alright, so I am advocating a return to corsets and parasols--is that so terrible? After all, Dita von Teese has made a career of them, and forty thousand Swarovski crystals can't be wrong. What if we reveal a little less instead of letting it all hang out?
