Let me be brave. Let me be brave.
Okay, it’s been months, so now I finally feel comfortable to comment…
… isn’t this a bit booby a death? Like, Five’s regeneration level of Boobs and Death. Like, this episode motivated me to go out and buy a sweater even though I used to hate them. Like, it’s very flattering on Jenna and she shouldn’t have to hide her boobs, but like, there’s loads of boob focus here and I’m not sure why considering this is Clara attempting agency in death.
If you want to shoot her from the stomach up, in any way, there’s gonna be boob. There’s no, like, specific emphasis on her boobs on the camera’s part, except insofar as her upper body is in the shot and her upper body happens to have boobs on it.
–stares at bra–
yyeah I dunno if I’d call that no ‘specific’ emphasis.
Jenna has got a pretty great bra on, I imagine it’s her own because I doubt the costume team said to her “here, wear this bra with brilliant support for this episode”. But the issue is that the lighting is from a high angle with little to no fill, meaning her bust has been put into massive relief, and then they decided to film her in profile, and asked her to pull her arms back to tighten her sweater over her bust as she pushes her chest out, and they filmed that in slow motion.
It’s possible this was all by chance, the lighting is high to suggest the lampposts, and there’s little fill because it’s late in the evening by this point, and it’s filmed in profile to better show the impact. But when they looked at the footage no one said ‘Aww geeze, this death scene has boobs all over it! Perhaps we should use a different shot.’
Ah, yeah, that’s fair, and it’s a problem that really could’ve only been solved by simply doing the blocking differently: you need the lampposts and the evening and, well, okay, maybe not necessarily the profile shot. But because that lighting is kind of immutable, for setting reasons, I have to imagine if they did notice there were not an abundance of shots they could use to fix the issue.
The slow motion is gratuitous, yeah, that should’ve been the first to go.
I…don’t really see a problem to be honest? (Maybe because my own, ur, proportions are actually bigger than Jenna’s, which I hate.) Stand-in-place-and-throw-your-arms-back is a pretty standard Heroic Death shot, so I kinda think…
…well, why deemphasize her bust? It’s not in a sexual situation, it’s not meant to titillate, that’s just what her body looks like? Does that make sense? Like, they could have given her a baggier sweater, they could have filmed the death blow from a different angle, but who for?
…for me?
idk I kind of spent more of FtR than I’d like wishing they had gone for a baggier sweater um.
I guess what I’m saying is, are we all noticing this because we’re used to all images of women being filtered through the male gaze?
And like…did Jenna/Clara choose to wear a tight top vs did the costuming department tell her to wear it to show off her chest more? Or, if someone on set had come along and told her to wear a bigger sweater to cover her chest, is that shaming (for lack of a better word) her for her normal body shape, or is it a perfectly reasonable attempt to avoid aforementioned male gaze-y stuff?
(I know someone will probably come along soon with a joke about The Discourse, but I’m actually quite enjoying this. We should probably move it to another post though, I think.)