Not Enough Wild Things
These days, with a few notable exceptions, the world's favorite activity is looking tragically tame on the big screen.
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Everyone likes sex. I mean, let's be honest--you, me, the girl sitting next to you, the guy sitting next to her, the archbishop standing in the cathedral, the native squatting in the bush--we all like sex and for good reason. Sex is a win/win proposition, good for you, good for your species. It's a brilliant little scheme, really: link physical pleasure with evolution and voila--you get the pyramids, Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and the nastycoeds.com Web site. Sex is the original labor of love, and the best part is that for about six seconds you aren't gonna hear anybody criticizing your work.
There was a time, not long ago, when people not only liked sex, but actually had it, too. Take a look at films a few decades ago: The Graduate--Dustin Hoffman has sex with his girlfriend and his girlfriend's mother; Shampoo--Warren Beatty has sex with clients, girlfriends and a girlfriend's daughter; Rosemary's Baby--Mia Farrow has sex with the Devil; Barbarella--Jane Fonda has sex with an angel and a machine; The Last Picture Show--Cloris Leachman has sex with a teenager. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice tag-team their way through the Kama Sutra; Jack Nicholson gets nooky from his murder suspect in Chinatown; a 12-year-old Brooke Shields gets deflowered in a whorehouse by a man old enough to be her father in Pretty Baby. In other words, if you -were an actor not having sex on the big screen in the '60s and 70s, you were either Burgess Meredith or Benji.
Now take a peek at film as the millennium nears its climax: a downsized James Bond gets less than the average ninth grader at a school with Saint in its name; director Adrian Lyne can't find a major studio distributor for his remake of Lolita, despite making the little firecracker two years older than she was in Nabokov's novel. Just look at the difference between the sex Tom Cruise has with Renée Zellweger in Jerry Maguire and what he did with Rebecca De Mornay in Risky Business. In the 1983 hoedown, it looked like sex and it sounded like sex and there was no buyer regret later on. Circa '96, was that supposed to be sex Cruise and Zellweger were having, or was it a seance? True, Cruise has terrific, Neanderthal, knuckle-dragging sex with ambitious slut Kelly Preston, but hey--that's exactly the kind of sex he should've had with the girl he loves, not the stuff that makes for warm and fuzzy feelings. Let me tell you something. Feelings are for your weimaraner or your mother. Sex is for people.
The occasional get-it-on movie still comes down the pike these days. But usually it trades in issues (_Boogie Nights_), or it's just plain bad (_Showgirls, Sliver, Jade_). These are movies about sex, not about people who have sex. Nobody smiles in movies like that because sex is no longer pleasant (especially if we're at the mercy of Joe Eszterhas's imagination). The delightful two some of Physical Pleasure and Evolution has been upstaged by the ménage à trois of the millennium--Health (AIDS), the Religious Right (for whom it's the sex, not the lying, that offends), and Technology (artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, gene therapy, cloning--someday in the not-too-distant future, physical sex between two people will be optional, like leather seats or a sunroof). Sex is no longer fun, no longer spontaneous, not even entirely necessary.
And yet, in a frankly disheartening age of abstemiousness, we still like sex because the lingering memory of it is powerful, like the phantom itch from an amputated limb. We still yearn for the images that get us stirred up when we sit in dark theaters. So, what's a filmmaker to do? Go for it and incur the wrath of the public's internalized censors, not to mention the very external media watchers and the MPAA? Not likely. No, filmmakers are left nervously calculating whether sex should occur, how it should occur if it should, how they can make it feel as if it has occurred without showing it occurring. Sometimes the filmmaker gets it right. Tom Cruise's sex scene with Kelly Preston in Jerry Maguire was a brilliant subversive strategy because it let director Cameron Crowe have it both ways--his leading man is capable of jungle sex, and we understand that this kind of sex is OK as long as it's not with someone nice like Renee Zellweger. Most of the time filmmakers get it wrong and end up contriving odd stand-ins for sexual situations, or senselessly dodging sex altogether.
Just what purpose did vixen du jour Gretchen Mol serve in Rounders? Edward G. Robinson, Steve McQueen's adversary in The Cincinnati Kid, had a nicer smile than Mol has in Rounders. She's supposed to be Matt Damon's girl, and sex with her is supposed to be the one thing that gets in the way of his jones for playing cards. But he tries to coax her into bed by joking that she won't feel a thing, and when she refuses, it's on to John Malkovich's Russian accent that gives the word "beat" two syllables.
Movies today are full of exactly these sorts of weird, conflicted hits and misses in the search for ways to address our appetite for sex on-screen without arousing our anxiety over calories. The closer the look you take, the stranger it gets.
One surefire way to relentlessly invoke the idea of sex without having to show any is to tell a story about a straight woman in love with a gay man. Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd play non-lovers in The Object of My Affection, a film that includes lingering shots of bare breasts. Unfortunately, they belong to Paul Rudd. Unfortunate, that is, if you're straight. If you're a gay man and you saw this film you probably got some grim satisfaction out of it, and not because Paul Rudd is cute, but because for once the straight person doesn't succeed in seducing or enlightening the gay person to the Hetero Way. I say grim because, except for Rudd's fine performance, this floppy-eared stuffed animal of a movie is thoroughly unsatisfying.
Here's the setup. When the incredibly nice Rudd gets dumped by his boyfriend, Aniston offers him the spare bedroom in her apartment, and the two become best friends. Then Aniston's lout of a boyfriend gets her pregnant, they break up and Rudd agrees to raise the child with her. Whereupon we, the audience, are gang-banged with silly innuendo and transparent foreplay: see the adorable couple get cozy on a roller coaster; see the adorable couple take dancing lessons together; see the adorable couple eat ice cream right out of the carton together on her bed while they're watching old movies.
Of course, Aniston falls in love with Rudd (Christ, Jesse Helms would fall in love with him), leaving us to spend a good 40 minutes of otherwise blank screen time waiting for the big moment of truth--does he or does he not have chest hair? Aniston languidly ambushes Rudd in the sack--slow, sloppy kisses, earplay, a journey down to his fuzzy stomach. The insinuation here is oral sex, and what gay guy can resist a short, sweet toot on the ole wiener whistle, right? Boy, is she cheap. Rudd graciously demurs, only to have Aniston throw a hissy fit at a mutual friend's wedding and demand to be loved by Rudd the way she loves him. Rudd steadfastly maintains his true self-- good for him!--but after nearly two hour's worth of mind numbing inertia we are almost willing to concede a little afternoon delight between Aniston and her unattainable love--almost.
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