Naked Came I

In a recent blog post, I echoed the title of the 1933 film starring Claudette Colbert, “I Cover the Waterfront.” It’s an evocative line, and suggests another classic film, “On the Waterfront,” starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden and a young Eva Marie Saint. Faithful reader and blogger My Eclectic Cafe invoked another classic by commenting with the closing narration from episodes of the 1958-59 television series, “Naked City:” “There are eight million stories in the naked city ….”

The word “naked” is a good one. We got it in English long ago via our Germanic language origins, and it shows up in Beowulf. The dragon who ultimately proves Beowulf’s bane is described as the nacod niðdraca — “the slippery, malicious dragon” (Seamus Heaney translated it as “slick skinned”).

One of the best qualities of that word, naked, is that it’s freighted with connotations. We’re all naked under our clothes, but many of us —depending on the culture we grew up in —  don’t always like to call attention to that fact. Being naked is often a taboo, lending the word a good deal of influence. Using it can intensify meaning or make the ordinary dramatic. “Truth” is more compelling when it’s “naked truth.” A city is more worth making a TV series about if it’s a naked city (the television show took its title from a classic 1948 film noir, “The Naked City”).

Without much effort, you’ll think of any number of films with “naked” in the title, as I did, once I started: The Naked Gun, The Naked Detective, Naked Came the Stranger. Search online, and you’ll turn up dozens of naked movies. The challenge would actually be to find a word that’s NOT been paired with naked in a film title; Naked Souls, Naked Killer, Naked Edge — I won’t go on.

In literature, both fiction and nonfiction, naked examples come to mind with the barest of effort: The Naked and the Dead, Naked Lunch, The Naked Ape. Songs? What about Randy Newman’s “The Naked Man?” The irrepressible British chef, Jamie Oliver, appropriated the word and launched his media career with his attention-getting BBC television show, “The Naked Chef.”

It occurs to me that there’s a fortune waiting for some writer willing to create “Naked” parodies of classic literature, along the lines of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Just imagine: The Sun Also Rises Naked, Naked Intruder in the Dust, O! Naked Pioneers. There could be an entire series of  “portraits,” beginning with A Naked Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Portrait of a Naked Lady, and including the related book, The Naked Picture of Dorian Gray. On you would go: Mrs. Dalloway Naked, David Copperfield Naked, culminating in your masterpiece: Naked, in Search of Lost Time (which would require most of your lifetime to write, not to mention a cork-lined room).

Not every single work of literature will be improved by the word, but there’s certain to be a market for an adult version of a contemporary young adult classic, Harry Potter and the Naked Half-Blood Prince.

What standard work would you suggest get a “naked” title? Let’s start the week with some fun. Leave a comment.

Today’s blog post title, Naked Came I, is the title of a biography of Auguste Rodin by David Weiss. I believe the line is a quotation from the Old Testament Book of Job.

© Brad Nixon 2018