Robert Rodriguez's Machete featured any number of ridiculous, over-the-top things to get excited about, from Lindsay Lohan shooting a gun in a nun's habit to the titular character using intestines as a bungee cord. But judging from the Internet the most exciting thing of all was viewing a small piece of Jessica Alba's skin that no one had ever seen before, when the famously nude-shy actress bared all for a brief shot in the shower.

Or did she? As uncovered by Britain's Daily Mail, Alba actually wore underwear, which were digitally removed in the final print. Not only did they remove, underwear, but they basically created the image of the breast that you see in the photo. They posted the side-by-side image, which you can see below.


Alba has said several times she'll never do a nude scene for a film, but the Daily Mail article doesn't explain how Machete got away with the digital underwear removal, or whether that's in violation of what I assume is a "no nudity" clause in Alba's contract. Obviously digitally creating nudity is a whole lot of effort with little reward unless you're working with a star on Alba's level, but is this going to be the start of some trend? Digital trickery has been used to mask nudity plenty of times in the past, most famously in the orgy scene in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, but are we now to the point of creating a nipple slip on an actress who most definitely kept her clothes on in real life?

I'm not sure how uncomfortable to feel about all of this not knowing how much a role Alba played in this. If she was OK with the nude scene but was unwilling to disrobe during filming, then hey, the digital effects get people googling her image without ever having to go the full monty. But if this is Rodriguez's way of getting around an actress's demands for privacy, a loophole in her contract, it feels incredibly sleazy and in violation of her basic rights to her own image.

What do you guys think? Is this some venture into a brave new world we ought to be afraid of, or is anything that allows for nudity we didn't get before just fine by you?