‘Mrs. Fletcher’s First Big Nude Scene Was a Celebration of Self, Not Porn

HBO’s Mrs. Fletcher is not afraid of sex. It’s a show that examines how our relationships to pornography, romance, intimacy, and above all sexuality pertain to our identities. However, the first time we see the titular character, Mrs. Eve Fletcher (Kathryn Hahn), strip down has nothing to do with titillation. She’s not masturbating to MILF porn or getting down and dirty with her silver fox date. Instead, Eve’s first nude scene in Mrs. Fletcher is an exquisitely beautiful moment of self-love rife with metaphor. As Mrs. Fletcher‘s creator and showrunner Tom Perrotta simply puts it, it’s “a moment of rebirth.”

Based on Perrotta’s book of the same name, Mrs. Fletcher is a story about a middle-aged single mother re-examining her life after her only son goes to college. She has just learned that her son Brendon (Jackson White) is cruelly domineering in his sex life, and has to deal with an elderly man’s dementia-driven public masturbation at the senior center where she works. For the first time, Eve is confronting her own attitudes about sexuality, including the fact that she might very well be a “MILF.” In Mrs. Fletcher Episode 1, Eve dives headfirst into the world of online porn. In Episode 2, she literally cannonballs naked into the deep end of a pool.

Throughout Mrs. Fletcher Episode 2, Eve is being pressured to get back into the dating world. A friend wants to set her up with a silver fox divorcé. Eve goes along, but this real life set up keeps awkwardly crashing into the hyper-sexualized fantasies that have consumed her days. She finally goes to the date, and while he seems nice enough, she is immediately distracted. She glances around the room catching other couples in various modes of intimacy: sexual, romantic, and even acrimonious. Panicked, she leaves before the date really begins and goes to the senior center where she works. She sneaks into the center’s indoor pool, strips down, and jumps in.

What follows is a gloriously shot sequence where Eve swims in blue-green pool water. Her nakedness matters, as does the non-sexual way in which it is shot. This isn’t about sex or intimacy for Eve; it’s about liberation. Tom Perrotta told Decider that was the point.

“The show is so much about sort of shedding your old self and finding a new one. I think for us, that pool scene is much more about a kind of symbolic rebirth than it is about anything sexual,” Perrotta said.”We talked so much about this [scene] and I know it was a really major condition for Kathryn. She just felt like the porn is a gateway to these other questions of self-invention and self-empowerment.”

Perrotta also admitted some metaphoric symbolism at play with Eve’s own name. “She is called Eve and we play around with the porn as kind of a Tree of Knowledge,” he said, intimating that pornography is merely Eve’s first taste at a deeper understanding of herself.

Keeping with that theme, it makes sense that Eve’s first moment of true nakedness on camera was one of self-love. She is learning to accept herself, love herself, and follow her own desires. That Roy, the senior citizen who’s been struggling with controlling himself in public, is the person who invades on this moment isn’t sexual, either. It’s just another instance in which the outside world keeps threatening to crash into Eve’s innermost thoughts.

Mrs. Fletcher Episode 3 premieres on HBO this Sunday, November 10. 

Where to stream Mrs. Fletcher