‘Altered Carbon’ Puts Sex and Nudity Front And Center To Make A Surprising Moral Point

**SPOILER WARNING: This piece discusses major spoilers from all ten episodes of Altered Carbon, including the ending.**
So Netflix’s new show Altered Carbon sure has a lot of nudity.
The show essentially opens on a sex scene in the shower. Nearly every major cast member strips down for at least one frame and we see the beautiful naked forms of extras strung up like garments. At one point, a practically naked woman falls from the sky and then we see her, still very exposed, discovered in the water by a father and son. There are prostitutes everywhere. Exposition is even served up while naked strippers squat into frame in the background. And Altered Carbon shows it all: breasts and penises, butts and, well, muffs.
On the one hand, the nudity makes sense insomuch as we’re dealing with a futuristic world where bodies are seen as empty vessels to be filled. On the other, there’s a lot of nudity. Furthermore, there’s a lot of sexual violence that comes hand-in-hand with all that copious nudity. And given that we are living in a cultural moment in which we are reckoning with sexual politics in a big way, the ubiquitous nudity could strike the average viewer as sourly off-key.

The issue naturally dominated discussion at a recent press day I attended for the show. When reporters got to sit with the cast, the first few questions lobbed at stars Joel Kinnaman, Martha Higareda, and James Purefoy had to do with how they tackled the show’s nudity. Kinnaman and Higareda went along jovially. The American-born, Swedish-raised Kinnaman said, “I grew up where you watch children’s television and there was an occasional titty. You know, very relaxed relationship to nudity.”

“Same in Mexico,” Higareda added, explaining that you see people in bikinis on morning television.
Purefoy, however, was a little snarky about the discussion’s direction. “Are we really – I’m sorry – we’ve got five minutes to talk about a multi-million dollar show that takes in gender identity, dystopia…and you want to talk about penis? You want to talk about nakedness? Really?”
The thing is sex and nudity is front and center in Altered Carbon. It’s not just American Puritanical prudishness talking — the show itself makes nudity an issue worth discussing. The morality of sexuality and the dangers in commodifying it are central concerns of the series. Altered Carbon starts off as a slick murder mystery and morphs into a story about a revolution. The undermined classes revolting in this case are the wounded, murdered, maimed, and discarded sex workers. At the beginning, these women and men are just window dressing, but as the series chugs on, they emerge from the background and reveal themselves to be the leading players. They aren’t writhing the background in early episodes for mere titillation, but as a means of foreshadowing the show’s true philosophical debate.

In fact, in the end, Altered Carbon‘s great hero is not Takeshi Kovacs (portrayed more often than not by Kinnaman). It’s not the man we’ve been following since the show’s opening moments. It’s Lizzie Elliott (Hayley Law). When Lizzie is introduced, she’s almost done so as a quaint afterthought. She is a young woman who destroyed by the Bancrofts’ vices and we meet her only because her grieving father is attempting to connect with her damaged psyche in a virtual reality landscape. Her father gets to be Kovacs’s partner while Lizzie only exists like a broken china doll in a cupboard. She is tucked away from the action and put somewhere she can be safe. However, it’s Poe, the super-loyal A.I. concierge of The Raven, who sees potential in Lizzie. He takes it upon himself to create a therapy program for the young woman that doubles as intense combat training. In the end, when it seems all else has failed our heroes, it is Lizzie, downloaded into a new synthetic form, who saves the day. She recasts herself as an avenging angel and single-handedly takes down “Head in the Clouds,” the floating house of snuff film horrors ruled by Takeshi’s sister Reileen (Dichan Lachman).
Reileen is a fascinating antagonist. She is a woman so defined by her own memories of suffering that she has numbed herself to the pain of others. Furthermore, she is obsessed with her brother. It’s more than the idea that he’s her last connection to her humanity; He was her only protector in life, and together they took on the monsters. Without his influence, Reileen has become a monster herself. To her, victimhood is a zero-sum game. Either she is the villain, or she is the victim. She can’t imagine a world where the innocent don’t get hurt and so she eagerly inflicts the pain. Almost as if to underscore this philosophy, the only moment in which actress Dichan Lachman appears nude isn’t in a moment of romance or vulnerability — as is the case the rest of Altered Carbon‘s main cast — but one in which a small legion of Reileen’s naked clones gang up on Ortega like some kind of twisted monster attack.

The nudity in Altered Carbon has a purpose. Its intent is to shock us at first, yes, but it also pushes us to examine our preconceptions about sex, gender, and sex work. The prostitutes in Altered Carbon are never treated as “bad.” If anything, the show exhibits tremendous sympathy for them. The evil-doers in Altered Carbon aren’t people who simply lust after flesh, but those who have forgotten how to treat others with any sort of dignity. The horror of “Head in the Clouds” has way more to do with the injustice of the class divide than the scandal of sex. Yes, what goes on in Reileen’s house of horrors is absolutely brutal, but the real obscenity is that the Meths think real people’s lives are something to be played with for kicks.
When she was asked about how the show fits in with the current moment — the #TimesUp, #MeToo movements — Dichan Lachman came to the show’s impassioned defense. “I think art is where you go to look at society through a focused lens and really ask questions. And there is so much, too much, violence against women in this world. Most women who are murdered are murdered by their husbands, lovers, or partners…so it is real,” said Lachman. “I think that censoring art is a dangerous thing because this is where we go — a safe place — a safe environment where the people in that environment can feel safe and say, ‘Hey, I don’t feel comfortable,’ or ‘Yes, let’s do it. Let’s make this as gritty and visceral as possible so that maybe it will push someone into doing something positive because they can see how horrific it is.’”
Lachman makes a sage point. The rampant sexuality and brutal violence of Altered Carbon may not be everyone’s cup of tea. The show may go too far for some viewers. After all, it does take the show ten whole episodes to twist back and rebuke some of its early nonchalance on the topic. But as a whole, Altered Carbon is not presenting acts of sexual violence to condone them, but to rally against them. Do we really want to talk about the sex and nudity? Yes, because Altered Carbon uses sex and nudity to say something bigger about class.

Stream Altered Carbon on Netflix