Although you may never have seen Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007) in its entirety, chances are you have seen the film’s bathhouse scene. Following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, most of the attention directed at Eastern Promises was in response to the full frontal nudity and graphic violence of the film’s knife fight, which Roger Ebert suggested would become a benchmark for future fight scenes, comparing it to the standard The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971) set for chase sequences (par. 7). While one caption for the scene posted on YouTube makes reference to Viggo Mortensen attending to his “call of duty” as an actor by shooting the entire fight sequence naked (“Eastern”), others simply warn about the “strong brutal and bloody violence,” drawing more attention to the sheer explicitness of the scene than anything else (“NUDE”). The reason the bathhouse scene is so powerful, however, has less to do with special effects or extraneous bloodshed and more to do with the impact of violence on the body in establishing the autonomy of the individual. Cronenberg portrays the heroic individual as a moral being, who offers his vulnerable naked body as proof of his loyalty to Scotland Yard. The bathhouse scene radically confronts the overwhelming ‘we’ that is set up in the prior scenes, re-examining the degree to which an individual is defined by his relationship with the group.