I had long avoided Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) for the same reason I avoided the slightly earlier Striptease (1996): no impetus to see either film appeared other than that supplied by my baser instincts.

You know what I mean. Some movies don’t wear their interest in sex on their sleeve—they wear it across their bared chests. I can’t possibly imagine recent comedies like Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) and The Girl Next Door (2004) containing characters interesting enough to vindicate these film’s heavily advertised flesh shots, and there’s many a “sophisticated” art house film out there which employs elaborate period costume because it’s apparently a lot more fun to take off.

Boogie Nights couldn’t be more obvious about its subject matter: anyone who’s seen the trailer knows it’s about the porn industry, about the rapid rise and slow descent of a guy with “one special thing.”

The question at hand, however, concerns whether this particular film’s use of nudity is necessary. You’d think that if you’re going to make a film about pornography, a few examples would be useful.

Joel Schumacher’s horrifying 8MM (1999) included such, pulling viewers down into the sordid world of underground snuff films that combine sex with extreme violence. The film turns a bit of skin and a lot of innuendo into the worst kind of emetic, making you (at least temporarily) regurgitate your own lewd proclivities along with the disgusting scenarios it has just force-fed you.

Boogie Nights, on the other hand, does not consistently mortify its viewers. No moral endgame provides cathartic resolution for this film, unlike Anderson’s later Magnolia (1999), nor does the film feel like a celebration of fast and loose sex. It’s more like watching a bunch of excited kids engage in winter play using rock-laden snowballs. Some kids have fun just building a castle and ruling the roost, others run around falling over themselves (and on top of each other, at random), and a good number end up in a pool of their own blood.

Sex and nudity punctuate many such moments. The two central, rather young characters quickly prove their willingness to shed clothing on command, and move from casual to filmed sex without missing a beat. There’s a hapless cameraman in the business who repeatedly walks in on his wife having sex with assorted guys; she does this many times in public as well as private venues, until the day his anger explodes and ends her life and his own. And then there’s the conflicted, drug-addicted divorcee unable to gain custody of her kid, a resident matriarch of sorts who “takes in” and encourages all the young male talent, and who actually treats sex just a tad bit more like the bonding experience it was created to be.

The sex scenes move the movie jauntily through weak comedy into pathetic tragedy and back to maudlin denouement, without ever taking seriously the emotional or spiritual cost of random sex on the participants. Nor does it treat the more measurable physical and social consequences of the characters’ lifestyles with any seriousness (a possible exception involves “Rollergirl”), something easier to do because the film is populated by about the least intelligent ménage of characters to ever grace the silver screen. (I don’t use the word metaphorically: most of the characters lack not only learning but the most rudimentary common sense.)

The scene in which the cameraman turns a gun on his naked wife and then kills himself in full view of nearby partygoers is pretty representative of the film’s many missed opportunities to report the serious consequences of the lifestyles it depicts. His tragicomic death impacts his friends very little that we can see: the scene ends before the witnesses can register more than initial shock, and the only evidence that the jealous cameraman even existed appears in the shape of an egregiously poor oil painting of the deceased, hung in a central location of the director’s large home. This violent event reveals something of the pain that accompanies infidelity (even among those committed to not caring), but ultimately delivers no real message because of its uneven tone.

To put it simply, this portrait of silly people who live silly lives and occasionally die silly deaths fails even to deliver the force of straight farce: its near-attempts at seriousness flatten instead of leavening its humor, leaving the sensitive viewer with little of substance to chew on.

And the nudity only makes matters worse, souring instead of sweetening the meal.