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.
While a movie like The Object of My Affection takes off from a concept that precludes our sexual gratification, some movies simply consider themselves too high-minded to give baser instincts any sway in the story at all. It's just as well, I suppose, that we didn't have Robert Redford humping Kristin Scott Thomas in the barn in The Horse Whisperer. High-mindedness has its place. But one place high-mindedness should not be is in a film with Demi Moore. I mean no insubordination or slight by that. To the contrary, Ms. Moore should consider it a compliment. Demi knows sex--she rocked in Disclosure. Demi knows romance--if you didn't shed a tear watching Ghost, you poison kittens for a living.
Why then, in the name of Adam and Eve, do you put Demi Moore in a film with Tom Cruise and make certain that the closest they get to having sex is banging Dungeness crab claws together in a seafood bar? The reason is that A Few Good Men, a classic of '90s chastity, was intent on advancing a lot of high-falutin' ideas about honor and courage, and we're supposed to believe that in the real world, attractive men and alluring women in the pursuit of honor and courage in military law don't reach for the Trojans at the drop of a gavel and wind up with each other's skin under their fingernails. Fair enough--if the real world is Salt Lake City. But this film takes place in bad old D.C., and even if it didn't, why cast Demi Moore if you're not going to use Demi Moore? It's like asking Mark McGwire to bunt. Sexuality is given lip service in A Few Good Men-- Cruise uses a baseball bat as a thinking stick and gets to utter throwaway lines to Moore like, "Wow--I'm sexually aroused, Commander." This is what you put a star like Tom Cruise up to when he's sharing the frame with a star like Demi Moore? Director Rob Reiner should have either let these two check out each other's briefs or sacrificed a little box-office draw for an actress with a little gravitas.
But just as A Few Good Men so wrongheadedly argued, it's all about the career today, isn't it? It's all about not getting sidetracked. It's all about being... professional. In 1997's The Peacemaker, George Clooney and Nicole Kidman were not supposed to have sex because they were too busy saving the world from Bosnian extremists in possession of nuclear weapons. Never mind that sex and danger go together like prosciutto and melon. Never mind that Clooney is a bona fide sex symbol and Kidman has a streak of sensuality that could melt the bulletproof glass on the Pope-mobile. Never mind that Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner neck in the sand despite a civilization-ending nuclear cloud drifting their way in On the Beach. Never mind that in the face of a massive extraterrestrial conspiracy, Scully and Mulder at least tried to kiss in The X-Files. If the reason Kidman and Clooney weren't granted a little lip-omatic immunity in The Peacemaker is that this was supposed to be a mature film grounded in reality, then that's all the more reason these two should have exchanged genetic material. As an added benefit, a little sex might have distracted us from a story with enough plot holes to make any pretensions about realism laughable to begin with.
But all we get in The Peacemaker is a succession of faux Freudian metaphors that make Tom's baseball bat in A Few Good Men seem as loaded a symbol as Bill Clinton's cigar. At the beginning of the film, for example, we get the damp collar of Nicole Kidman's blouse. See, she was half-naked in the pool just moments before arriving at the Defense Department to show those good ole boys in their little sailor suits that she can place transatlantic phone calls with the best of them, wet hair be damned. Then, before they go to Bosnia, George and Nicole meet their contact in Vienna. "Is Kodoroff involved with Kordech? Is that why we're meeting in Vienna?" Kidman asks. Good question, and it's never resolved, because the only reason they're in Vienna is that Vienna is sexier than Bosnia, and that's important because Clooney and Kidman can't, as we know, actually have sex.
Clooney brings along some American music CDs for the contact's 16-year-old daughter, and in chit-chat (remember, they're keeping it real), the contact tells Clooney that the daughter is dating a 20-year-old guy into motocross. Why? Because sexual innuendo is better than no sex at all and Clooney and Kidman are having no sex at all. Why, in the middle of a grave multinational conflict taking place in a non-tropical climate, does Kidman suddenly start wearing a sleeveless blouse? Because Clooney and Kidman can't have sex. In the funniest scene dedicated to the precept that Clooney and Kidman can't have sex, Clooney, with Kidman at his side, uses a Mercedes to play demolition derby with the bad guys and completely trashes a town square. BOOM! He slams it in reverse, with a tight shot on that sexy wrist of his. BOOM! He jams it in drive, with a tight shot of Kidman, flung backwards into her seat. BOOM! He jams it in reverse--well, you get the picture.
Speaking of movies that involve sex that isn't sex, in City of Angels Nicolas Cage willfully and irrevocably surrenders his immortality for the rest of eternity to spend a day or so with Meg Ryan. Now, if I were an angel, you'd have to fork over Cameron Diaz wearing gravity boots and glow-in-the-dark lipstick before I'd hang up my halo. But this is one of those '90s films with emotional import and gentle laughter--meaning absolutely no one has a good time and nothing as abrasive as actual sex can intrude. Now, once again, the filmmakers have placated our need for sexual content. In fact, they've bent over backwards to create an eau de toilette sensuality, the kind perfected in TV commercials for Calvin Klein's Obsession.
When we meet Meg Ryan, who plays a surgeon burned out by the merciless entirety of death, she's reporting to the E.R. where her first major duty is to take off a few articles of clothing for us. A little later we get to see her bathing with candles, a long-neck bottle of beer and Paula Cole on the stereo. Nicolas Cage, one of many angels who roam the earth (and who, in this film anyway, look like the bad cowboys in a Sergio Leone Western) falls in love with Ryan from afar and follows her around, finally encountering her in a library where he reads her a passage from A Moveable Feast about eating oysters and experiencing "their strong taste of the sea." Devastating eroticism, huh?
"Oh, now, wait a minute," a friend of mine objected. "Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage have this big sex scene in front of the fire. What about that?"
Yeah, what about it? This is sex? Meg Ryan had more sex faking it in When Harry Met Sally.... Cage shows some life, but come on, already--here is a fallen angel, a guy who hasn't gotten any for the equivalent of 50 trillion consecutive life sentences. If he's gonna have sex, it damn well better be an orgasm that looks like the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. "Tell me what that feels like," Ryan says to Cage as they're making love. "Mmmm... warm and aching," he moans. Ditto for the flu.
Not all movies these days are out to cheat our sexual taste-buds with cinematic NutraSweet when they hold back on depicting sex. Ronin is an example of a filmmaker getting it right. In the movie, mercenary Robert De Niro has a few days to kill before the big job he's signed on to do. He's in Paris, the city of lovers, wine shampoos and women with armpit hair. One of his partners in the big job is Irish knockout Natascha McElhone. Here's a sexual opportunity if there ever was one, but he doesn't have sex with her, and it isn't because this film takes the Salt Lake City-approved view of life. The driving force behind the sexual absenteeism in Ronin is the age-old principle of discretion: the filmmakers know we don't actually want to see De Niro have sex with McElhone. De Niro is one of the greatest actors of the past 50 years, but sexual tenderness has never really been his long suit.
He was brilliantly effective ordering Cathy Moriarty to take her panties off in Raging Bull, back-dooring Tuesday Weld in Once Upon a Time in America, sticking his finger in the pubescent Juliette Lewis's mouth in Cape Fear, and murdering Helena Bonham Carter on her wedding night in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. But if De Niro is playing a sympathetic character in Ronin, why muck it up with sex? He does get to kiss McElhone, and the scene actually has some sexual playfulness. They're on a stakeout when a police car nears them, and he initiates a fake kiss to make them seem like lovers parked on the side of the road. The car passes without incident and they end their bogus embrace. Then, after they sit there in silence for a few seconds, McElhone leans over and brazenly kisses De Niro a second time. The sexual message is clear: a mere suggestion of capitulation is the better part of valor. Or, as they say over at the Theta House, I coulda fucked her.
Mrs. Dalloway is another exercise in discretion, though a different one. Mrs. Dalloway_ could have had a sex scene or two and been a stunning piece of work just the same. But the fact of the matter is, by not showing sex, the film inspires an exploration of sexual longing that might not otherwise have been as powerful. Vanessa Redgrave, as the middle-aged Mrs. Dalloway, tells her story through narration and flashbacks. We see her as a young woman (played by Natascha McElhone) in turn-of-the-century London with Peter (Alan Cox), her confidant and wild, iconoclastic partner in crime. Although she clearly loves him, she throws him off for a "responsible" marriage to a man so steeped in convention everyone makes fun of him behind his back. Peter takes to travel and failed romances until, 30 years later, he shows up on the day of one of the many parties Vanessa gives as a way of privately clinging to her past freedoms. The two lovers, who never had sex when they were young and aren't going to have it now, dance together in an affirmation of the idea that the real power of sex is in the with holding of it. Redgrave's story is a tale that has sex on the tip of everyone's tongue, yet we don't ever see anyone having it. And we don't object to that--not because we've been "subliminally" satisfied by watching the stars fondle baseball bats or take bubble baths by candlelight, but because in the absence of sex we, like the film's characters, have an experience of that intense feeling for all that might have been.
OK. Question: why is there no sex in Grosse Pointe Blank? It's a dark comedy skewed to a sexually active demographic. It stars the intelligently handsome John Cusack as a yuppie (young underworld professional) assassin - who goes back to his hometown to do a hit while he attends his 10-year high school reunion. In the process of checking out the old town, he discovers the fire's still hot with his old flame, played by the sexually affable Minnie Driver. Witty dialogue crackles like Jiffy Pop (am I missing something? Did every character in this film want to write for "Just Shoot Me"?) and the soundtrack pulses with tunes by The Specials, English Beat and other inoffensive '80s bands. But it's like having at your disposal all the ingredients for a Caesar salad and using them to make a hairpiece. What's the deal?
"John Cusack just doesn't like to take his clothes off," an industry friend explained to me. I don't buy it. My guess is that John thinks sex scenes are demeaning. I'll bet he thinks sex on-screen is mostly just gratuitous, knee-jerk, exploitive, boring stuff these days. Or that it's a mere marketing tool. People who have an inclination to be original--like Cusack--often refuse to do sex. But John cut off his dick to spite his groin. This film should have had an honest-to-Peter love scene in it.
Now for a discussion of movies that dare, even in a bleak pre-millennial era set on jailing our libidos, to show sex onscreen and do it interestingly.
One could claim, without erring on the side of exaggeration, that James Cameron has his detractors. But give the man his due. In making Titanic, he beat the odds. Enough, already, about the drama-club dialogue, the nonexistent character development and the lame "flying" scene with DiCaprio and Winslet on the prow of his Mexican knockoff. Cameron wrote in a sex scene that belonged in the movie as much as the iceberg. Look, if you're gonna get wet forever, you should at least get wet for fun first. Somehow, all the running, lifting, wading and climbing DiCaprio does to keep Winslet alive seems less futile because of that terrific, window-fogging encounter they had in the back seat of that horseless carriage. Of the handful of Titanic movies that preceded Cameron's, none had sex or--even substantial--love scenes. Hats off to Cameron for forging a full-service love story, bodice and all, out of a real-life catastrophe and pulling it off with taste, and without despoiling the memory of those who were lost in the tragedy.
So much for reassuring sex. Now let's talk about The Ice Storm. Lots of people have sex in The Ice Storm. Kevin Kline, who is conducting an affair with his neighbor's wife (Sigourney Weaver), catches Weaver's older son (Elijah Wood) about to get a hand job from his own daughter (Christina Ricci), who's wearing a Nixon mask. His own wife (Joan Allen), who knows of his affair with Weaver, wins Weaver's husband (Jamey Sheridan) in one of those car-keys-in-the-fishbowl antics that swinging couples in the 70s played, and has painfully awkward sex with him in the front seat of a car, an experience made even more pathetic by Sheridan's quick trigger. ("That was terrible!" he cries in embarrassment in one of the most heartbreaking of many heartbreaking moments in the picture.) With the exception of a poignant under-the-sheets interlude between Ricci and Adam Hann-Byrd (Weaver's younger son), none of the sex in The Ice Storm is particularly appealing. But unlike the usual sexual shenanigans, the sex here is necessary, vital and chillingly real. And whereas the use of sexual imagery in movies like City of Angels is as laughable and boorish as your Aunt Floozy on Ritalin, The Ice Storm's imagery is visual poetry--Elijah Wood kissing Christina Ricci in an empty swimming pool cluttered with fallen leaves says many things sputtering candles just can't convey.
The Ice Storm is extraordinary in the way it acknowledges the pervasiveness of sex in human life without going the step further to condone it with the old "consenting adults" nonsense. In one sense, The Ice Storm could be an instructional video advocating Family Values--if you fool around, bad things "will happen to you. Just a few hours after Allen and Sheridan have sex, Sheridan's son (Elijah Wood) dies in a freak accident. On the other hand, Kline's family survives intact, both physically and, hopefully, emotionally, and there's at least a suggestion that the great void at the center of his marriage might never have been dealt with had he not been unfaithful. Sex--the perfect imperfection--takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
That said, thank you, Mama and Papa Dillon, for giving us Matt, and thank you, Matt, for your lunatic performance in Wild Things, a movie that strikes a decisive blow for hungry, carnal low-mindedness on the big screen. The story opens as high school guidance counselor Dillon scrawls the word SEX across a blackboard and, after pausing for effect, adds the word CRIMES. "What constitutes a sex crime?" asks police detective Kevin Bacon, volunteering his expertise for the good of the town's teens. "Not get-tin' any!" one of them shouts out. Leave it to our children to give voice to our unspoken fears swirling in the millennial malaise, eh?
Dillon soon gets unjustly accused of raping two of his students--the white-trash Neve Campbell and the rich, heathenly Denise Richards. "I don't fuck my students," Dillon soberly declaims to his feral, ambulance-chasing lawyer (Bill Murray). We believe Dillon; he draws our sympathy as he loses his job and his house, but not his dignity. Spearheading the case against him is detective Bacon, who drives out to Campbell's trailer after getting an urgent call from her and gets to hear some of the all-time best, bizarro-noir lines, of the cinematic century. "Jesus, it took you guys long enough," Campbell complains to him. "What if someone was trying to strangle me, or fuck me in the ass, even?"
At Dillon's trial, Campbell is forced to admit on the stand that both she and Richards were lying, acting out a vendetta against Dillon. The case is dismissed, whereupon Murray negotiates a libel settlement against Richards's rich mom, Theresa Russell. Next time we see Dillon he's in a motel room with Campbell and Richards. The three of them concocted the scheme to get eight-and-a-half million dollars from Russell. How do they celebrate? By basting each other with champagne and having a little three-way organ-grinding session that is such a wicked about-face from Dillon's assumed persona that we want to get up and cheerlead him as he's sucking on Richards's tits--Yeah! Go, baby! Do it! No need for coy sexual conjuring here. Wild Things is, the ultimate "fuck you" to '90s prudery, preciousness and hypocrisy.
So, here we are at the millennium, with catastrophes like the Y2K to avert and a billion more souls to feed. For my money, the thing we should be worrying about is how to get real, meaningful, recognizably human sex back up on the big screen. "It's not that I'm against sex," says Christina Ricci in The Opposite of Sex, "but... it always ends up in kids or disease or, like, you know, relationships." Think long and hard about those words--and then, for the sake of humanity, and even more importantly, for the sake of movies, forget every last one of them. Then go out and scratch that phantom limb or, at the very least, rent Last Tango in Paris.
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Michael Angeli wrote about men who cry in movies for the July 98 issue of Movieline.