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The Blue Lagoon: A Lesson in Victorian Birds, Bees, and Absolute Blankness** 🦜🌊
Cast your minds back with me to the early 1980s. 📼 Someone had managed to score a bootleg VHS tape of *The Blue Lagoon*, and there I was, somewhere between eight and ten years old, watching a movie that felt thoroughly forbidden. 🫣 Now, even at that tender age, I wasn’t completely clueless. 🧐 I didn't know all the intricate details, mind you, but I knew the basic process. I knew a man and a woman had to get together, I knew what a woman looked like, and I knew that’s where babies came from. 👶👶
So, watching these two shipwrecked teenagers on a tropical paradise completely baffled by their own growing pains? It seemed a bit silly, even to a kid! 🏝️🤷♂️
But looking back at it now with a proper love for history, the whole thing completely changes. 📜💡 To actually appreciate this movie and find it believable, you have to rip yourself away from the modern world—where absolutely everything is out in the open 📱👀—and drop yourself squarely into the Victorian era where the story actually takes place.
And let me tell you, the Victorians took modesty to an absolute, ridiculous extreme! 🤐🎩
Back then, you simply *did not* speak of certain things. Mothers didn't talk to daughters, fathers didn't talk to sons, and the human anatomy was treated like a state secret. 🤫❌ Children were wrapped in a blanket of total ignorance. So, when Emmeline and Richard are stranded as kids, they don’t just lose a ship—they lose the entire social script. 🚢💔 They hit puberty with absolutely zero vocabulary for what on earth is happening to their bodies! 😳🔥
There is a brilliant moment in the film that perfectly sums this up: Richard finds an old anatomy book, and he is absolutely spellbound by a simple, side-profile drawing of a naked woman. 📖👁️👄👁️ Nowadays, we’d chuckle at that. But in the Victorian era? A scandalous image like that wasn't just rare; it was practically non-existent. A side-shot line drawing was enough to completely blow a young man's mind! 🤯💥
If you view the movie through our modern lens, you’ll spend two hours shouting at the screen. 🗣️📺 But if you keep it in the proper historical context of Victorian stifling modesty, *The Blue Lagoon* actually holds up. It becomes a fascinating, funny, and rather poignant look at what happens when human instinct has to completely reinvent the wheel, simply because society decided the wheel was too naughty to talk about! 🎡🤭
Here is just that shiny new trivia section for you, darling, all formatted and ready to copy-paste straight onto the bottom of your post! 🎬👇
Speaking of keeping things hidden, there’s some wild behind-the-scenes trivia that fits this Victorian vibe perfectly. 🎬🤫 Brooke Shields was only 14 during filming, so to comply with legal rules, any actual nudity required a 32-year-old **body double**! And for Brooke's close-ups? The crew literally used tape and glue to stick her massive wig directly to her chest so the island breeze wouldn't reveal a single thing. Talk about dedication to the cover-up! 😭💨
