At Pam & Tommy, don’t go thinking about it.
Bringing the actors Jennifer Anniston and Sebastian Stan together in a room is one of those geniuses that the magazine has accustomed us to. Variety. The reason to bring them together? You don’t need any, really. Is it okay with a dream casting to nurture its traditional series of Actors on Actors and his long collection of covers with star duets, now converted into an Apple TV + program (not yet available in Spain)? To us, yes. The fact is that, you or I or Jennifer Aniston, we have Sebastian Stan in front of us… and what do we ask him? I mean, we asked him months after the premiere of the Disney + series Pam & Tommy. Are you going to ask her about her role in Falcon and Winter Soldier and the Marvel movies, now that his character is fallow? No, right? Are you going to ask him about Fresh, a film that has received good reviews, but has gone unnoticed? Also not. The cannibal in film and television, at this point, is already a lot of work. So you ask him about his chatty penis on the show. Pam & Tommy, because you only have that question in your head. Because the moment Sebastian Stan, well Tommy Lee, starts talking to his penis on the show you can’t get him out of your head…probably forever. The scene is straight out of Lee’s autobiography, tommylandand Sebastian Stan’s character chats happily on stage with Jason Mantzoukas, The Good Place and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, who is the one who puts the voice to his penis. There’s a penis obsession on television and neither you nor Jennifer Aston can escape it. For the right reasons, mind you. The penis tries to convince Sebastian Stan’s character that he just got divorced and should take it easy going back to the vicarage (so to speak), Lee contradicts his penis, explaining that Pamela Anderson (Lily James). The penis was against Pamela Anderson…
Penises are experiencing on streaming platforms what we at Esquire.es have decided to call the McLuhan effect because in this obsession “the penis is the message”. We have also baptized this phenomenon as the penestroika, the movement to liberalize close-up scenes of penises in television series. So it’s normal for Jennifer Aniston to ask Sebastian Stan: “How do you prepare for that? How do you work a scene like that from the script?” “At first you panic. It was a difficult scene to shoot, basically because we didn’t know if it was really going to work, if it was going to be too much or not,” Sebastian Stan replies. “Did you record two versions?” Aniston asks. “No. There were all kinds of prosthetics and people with cords plugging things into sockets [la escena contó con cuatro tiriteros, para que te hagas una idea]. See, we got the benefits of CGI, but we went old school, which was an interesting experience. His penis is a character in the book [de memorias de Tommy Lee]. So the writers tried to come up with a creative way for how this guy would confess his love to this woman,” replies Stan.
And the question behind Aniston’s curiosity is why are we seeing so much penis on TV? Perhaps the most recent examples are in Euphoria and in the fellatio scene And Just Like Thatgoing through the nude of Scenes from a Marriageall of sex educationSteve Zhan’s prosthetic penis in The White Lotus… Minx (HBO Max) has been the last to add 35 new penises in 58 seconds. We wanted to find an explanation. Part of it is explained by what we have baptized as effect Game of Thrones, a fiction in which we saw only seven penises and no less than 134 pairs of breasts. That’s why, deep down, it’s more important than Sebastian Stan’s penis, the fact that Lily James’s breasts in Pam & Tommy be false. The rest of the explanation has to do with a greater gender parity between director, producers and scriptwriters, that there is a desire to show a more real sexuality, that there are intimacy coordinators on the sets. The idea is that the usual questions disappear: why only a naked woman comes out when there is another man? Why weren’t there nudes when there were sex scenes between two men?).
And now we come to McLuhan: the penis is the message. That’s why Aniston, deep down, asks the question he does. Not that it’s necessary to see penises. Or the penises don’t have to be real. What was missing was the sexual value of the male body and not just the sexual value of the female body in sex scenes. Jim Henson would have welcomed four puppeteers moving a penis.
Source: Fotogramas
Jason Root is a writer at Gossipify, known for his in-depth coverage of famous people in entertainment, sports, and politics. He has a passion for uncovering the stories behind the headlines and bringing readers an inside look at the lives of the famous. He has been writing for Gossipify for several years and has a degree in Journalism from UC Berkeley.
