Stripped
Entertainment WeeklySept 6, 2002

The documentary, STRIPPED, is a rare honest expose of the flesh life.
Thanks to a number of intersecting forces (The internet, the rise of
upscale topless club, Howard Stern's nightly flesh parade on E!) the image
of stripping as a degraded, exploitative profession now competes in the
culture with a kind of post feminist counter myth: the acrobatic yuppie
sleaze goddess as self-empowering cash machine. The fascination of
STRIPPED, a documentary about the world's second oldest profession, is that
it refuses to kowtow to either (oversimplified) version of reality.
Instead, it reveals how stripping, in a world where sexual imagery has
become a corporate mega business, could be at once exploitative and
empowering.
The director, Jill Morley, is herself a former pole dancer, and that may
account for the film's investigative toughness as well as its compelling
refusal to judge. Morley tracks the lives of five strippers, including
herself, most of whom have toiled along the same New Jersey grind-bar
circuit that houses Tony Soprano's beloved Bada Bing! Lounge. Nearly all
of the women felt crummy about their looks growing up, and they describe
getting up on stage as an emotional narcotic that, in a strange way,
mirrors the dehumanized erotic high that draws men into strip clubs in the
first place. There's a steep price for the fix though: By the end of the
movie, one of the subjects has disappeared, and the rest describe how the
shiny hard core of capitalism - the very aspect of stripping they initially
found liberating - has begun to calcify their souls.
B+
--- Owen Glieberman