Why Less Sex in the Movies is a Good Thing
I admire Dargis for her faith in a New Intimacy that actually boasts a progressive approach to onscreen sexuality -- the idea that "the demure fade to black and the prudish pan -- coitus interruptus via a crackling fire and underwear strewn across the floor" may give way to the more honest, bruising lust of a film like Blue Valentine or, better still, the uninhibited carnality of movies like Last Tango in Paris. And on the one hand she has reason to be optimistic: In the last three months alone we've had two very R-rated films about the nature of sexual relationships -- Love and Other Drugs (above) and No Strings Attached -- that featured four young, attractive, A-list American stars in various states of undress and simulated sexual congress. Hot! (?) On the other, it's the latter of those two films -- the comedy about sex's inseparability from love, a "neo-Puritanical" principal if ever there was one -- that made the bigger splash among domestic audiences: $60 million (and counting) at the box office, compared to Drugs' $32 million. Make what you will of those numbers, but they seem to suggest a public distaste for taking screen sex seriously.
Well, make that big-screen sex. Sexuality flourishes on television, blossoming in circumstances both banal (Californication, Boardwalk Empire) and extreme (True Blood, Spartacus: Blood and Sand). This truly is natural: The cloisters of our living rooms offer a certain immunity to blushing, and viewers can privately relish the way contemporary producers and writers strain the medium's boundaries compared to just five years ago. (To say nothing of the quaint standards of our upbringings.)
That just doesn't wash in movies. Few contemporary American directors have any clue how to handle sex conceptually or visually; I still laugh when I think about Steven Spielberg's ham-handed depiction of Eric Bana's orgasm in Munich. Scorsese bears as much of the blame for the mainstreaming of violence over sex as anybody besides Quentin Tarantino, and you can count the latter filmmaker's attempt at sex scenes on one hand (one finger, actually, if you disqualify anal rape). David Lynch and David Cronenberg (Canadian, I know, but still) get it, but with rare exception -- Wild at Heart comes to mind -- their sexuality is itself often inseparable from blunt force trauma. P.T. Anderson made a definitive picture of the '70s porn industry before ultimately retreating all the way back to the late 19th/early 20th century. Gregg Araki may be the only one still exploring our horny folkways with any regularity (or success). Forget mores and social codes; strictly as a cinematic prerogative, sex is utterly secondary. Characters want their private lives, too. What's suggested often stimulates more than what's seen. Chaste is the new torrid.
Does that make us more repressed? I don't think so. In fact, maybe we are a more imaginative film culture for it. The near sexlessness of something like The Social Network is one of its most exhilarating qualities; the utter disregard -- contempt, even -- Mark Zuckerberg has for romantic love (or for the potential of his fortune to help him acquire it) underscores the alienation we all tend to feel in an increasingly mediated culture. By contrast, isn't witnessing the aftermath of Sean Parker's one-night stand enough? Should his conquest have been nude? Should he have been nude? It's a sexier scene for its restraint.
The flipside may be Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo's trysts in The Kids Are All Right -- overdone, gratuitous and wholly unnecessary. "Check this out," director Lisa Cholodenko seems to say. "This lesbian really did get the red f*cked out of her hair. Her relationship is in trouble!" Yeah, we get it -- but if the whole point is that the sex isn't the grounds for a relationship to live or die, what purpose does such explicit depiction serve? At best it's patronizing. At worst it's basically porn.
In any case, it's the last thing more and more filmgoers want to see. There may not be one specific answer to the Times' question, "Whatever happened to sex in movies?", but there is one specific future in which "sex in movies" means a range of content from Europe and the American indie sphere, consumed at international film festivals and a few art houses before trickling into the more voracious home-viewing market. And we'll discuss them the way we always have -- in an increasingly atomized media. Or over Valentine's Day dinner. Or in bed, I suppose, if you're lucky. Just do me a favor, if so, and keep that one to yourself. I seriously don't want to know.
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Comments
Agreed. I think one of the sexiest scenes I've witnessed is from the Last of the Mohicans. Hot, passionate, arousing, but the camera never leaves their upper torsos, and their clothes never leave their bodies (onscreen).
There is something undignified about our show-it-all mentality, which reaches beyond the screen and into our voyeurism and garish displays on Twitter and Facebook, our support of paparazzi rights to invade a public figure's life at any cost or risk, and our desire for disclosure of all information even if there is danger to others by the exposure (looking at you Assange). I hope the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction, where we stop feeling the need to broadcast everything and see everything.
"Why Less STV Editorials Are A Good Thing"
This little article is patronizing at best and pathologically repressed at worst. Quite frankly, STV, this piece says a lot more about your personal sexuality-related neuroses than about the realities of sex in film.
Let me destroy your little thesis - no, not everyone wonders if they're being judged when they're sitting next to a stranger during a sex scene. Some of us assume we're sitting with people who see it as two characters having sex - nothing less, nothing more. Sex is a part of life and when it comes to some characters, it's an integral part of WHO they are. The problem with your idea here is that you assume that the only possible response an audience can have to a sex scene is titillation or disgust, but a sex scene can also bare the character's soul or the loving intimacy between two beings, or any other number of things.
Becoming self-conscious about what you're watching happens to people when 1) the sex is completely divorced from plot or tone of the film 2) they're repressed about watching ANY of it in the first place because they have an infantile idea of the implications of the act (does this one sound a bit more like you?).
I can confidently assure you that while I watched the Blue Valentine "oral" scene, I wasn't thinking "oh wow, they're naked and pretending to fuck, I wonder if my seat-mate has a hard on, this is awkward city". I was too busy thinking "Oh, shit. There's no going back. There's no repairing this marriage." So kindly refrain from including me and others like myself in your merry band of repressed filmgoers.
You may think you're the voice of reason looking back on the more "creative" days of "less is more", but it all depends on the genre and the specific movie. "Less sex in film" isn't any better of an idea than "more sex in film". It all depends on what's right for each individual movie. It's true, The Social Network gains effectivity from the lack of explicit sex scenes because it belongs in the tone of the film and in the story the filmmakers are trying to tell. The Dreamers wouldn't work as well without it.
By the way, your comment about the Sean Parker post-coital scene is very telling. You claim that it was sexier for its lack of nudity, I'll point out the idea behind it wasn't to titillate you and that your point of view doesn't make you any more moral than a garden-variety porn watcher, you're just responding to a different fetish.
Well, if we can agree on nothing else, this much is certain: One of us clearly needs to get laid.
Some of us really do like sex in movies, get highly aroused by it, are not bothered in the least to be sitting next to total strangers while we get wet at the sight of it and want to see more sexuality on screen (and less violence). It's unclear why less sex in the movies is a good thing from your writing, except that it's something that you would personally like to see less of in a world where Aussie gunslingers trump "emo-fascists." Happy Valentine's Day, Stu.
Is it anything about the context, or the director's skill, or something? Because I seriously loved "The Dreamers," but I also became extremely uncomfortable during the Julianne Moore-Mark Ruffalo scenes in "The Kids Are Alright." And I am not sure I understand what Peter Greenaway is all about.
I like sex. Plain and simple. However, I don't really like seeing sex depicted in movies that are not pornography.
Fair enough, though in my defense pretty much anything trumps Blue Valentine, whose emo-fascism was predicated less on the sexuality (which bored me more than anything else) than on Gosling and Cianfrance bludgeoning the audience with all that Broody White-Guy Angst.
You suck.Just because you're a prude doesn't mean the rest of us agree.American movies are 99%boring formulaic marketed crap, and the declining theater attendance means they sure want something. Since the Eighties, sex in cinema has been on the decline, and so have the in theater audiances.Make of it what u will.
It always seems that the comments section at Movieline is much more enlightening than the original articles...
I think the problem here may be the fact that when the sex seems real, then it can be uncomfortable. Nothing's worse than watching a movie where a couple just had sex and they have a bunch of clothes on. Or when they are doing it under the covers. That immediately takes you out of the movie. Everything in a movie needs to feel real or none of it will feel real.
It's the example of The Kids are All Right that's most troubling. We most DEFINITELY needed to see them in bed. The scene showed us what Julianne Moore's character wanted, something she wasn't getting from Annette Bening's character, which we learned from their earlier passion-free sex scene. Not every scene in a movie is required to further the plot. Sometimes they're required to further the character arcs. Had the characters just been shown kissing, would we have understood her passion or her recklessness? No. It would've looked like she was falling in love with him, which is not what was happening. Sometimes sex is important to what's going on.