Reflections on Playboy: Garcelle Beauvais pictorial: what can brown do to a guy?

July 18, 2007

Garcelle Beauvais pictorial: what can brown do to a guy?

The Haitian-born actress and August 2007 Playboy cover girl is a truly deserving candidate for a celebrity pictorial. Her youthful 40-year-old body holds a rare and devastating abundance of both womanly curves and Amazon muscle tone. In an alternate timeline, she could have been a widely celebrated exotic dancer. As it is in our version of history, she now confesses to an underage stint serving guests of the New York Playboy Club as Bunny Garcelle in the mid-1980s. Luckily for all, photographer Stephen Wayda knows how to chronicle by suggestion what might have been.

In most of the photos, Wayda complements the brown tones of the model’s skin, eyes, and hair with plenty of brown in her surroundings (on a ship, by the way, but that’s not so important). As is often said in aesthetic debates about color versus black and white in motion pictures, a scarcity of colors tends to accentuate line, shape, and form. The pinup genre has generally done well by using full color. But devices like this can help photography rival sculpture [not work-safe] as a loving expression of shape. (As the last link shows, we men never change. We’ll always love triplets.)

It’s not the only such trick this pictorial uses, either. By first visual impressions, a completely naked woman might just be a nudist on family vacation. But a mostly naked woman adorned in something very showy and elaborate is obviously out to drive the fellas a little crazy—and is therefore more likely to do so. In one pic, she stands with her back to the camera at a full-length (except for pelvic-level) mirror. Not only do the curves running symmetrically from her shoulders to her thighs identify Beauvais as the avatar of the muse of the Stradivari family. Not only does she tenderly rebuke our greedy eyeballs with an “oh, you dog” look through the mirror. She ensures total victory by wearing a tiny, elaborate, neo-Egyptian set of chains around her chest and midsection. In some photos, she has lost the chains and replaced them with rhinestones glued all over her body from the neck down. This is advanced weaponry, folks.

Erotica, though made just as historically necessary by the human nervous system as music, may always have more difficulty traveling across subcultures of sexual morality in a diverse society like the United States. A very sexual musical form like rock and roll can easily outpace erotica at its almost mildest. Still, in its own way, cheesecake photography may turn out to be as formally complex and precise as tonal harmony in Western classical and popular music. And if it’s such a joy to let Johann Sebastian Bach mess with our heads, why not let Hugh Hefner do it, too?

Since bootlegs of Beauvais’ exclusive Cyber Club shots are all over the internet already, I would feel like a nerd if I didn’t post one of them. I give you the one that Playboy Enterprises’ lawyers will least mind me stealing, of course:

Post title explanation, November 26, 2008, 12:21 p.m.: Since this blog has an uneven record on racial sensitivity, I should mention that the post title is a pun on the UPS slogan “What can brown do for you?”

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:36 PM

July 18, 2007

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