Happy Valentine's Day! It's time to get together with that special someone in your life and spend money you don't have on garish rituals that would probably be much more romantic if you didn't feel compelled to commit them out of obligation to a calendar and/or greeting-card manufacturer. I mean! It's time to get together for a nice dinner and a movie -- hopefully one with some intimate, even sexy moments between the characters onscreen. If you can find one. Which might be difficult. Thank goodness.
The very deficit Manohla Dargis lamented in yesterday's NYT -- that of "serious or serious-enough movies, domestic and imported, in which sex mattered as much if not more than violence" -- is one I think a lot of people consider a relief. That's not to say the cinema of violence is any more culturally redeeming or gratifying than the cinema of sex, or that there's often much for adults to cheer about in, as Dargis' describes them, "corporate blockbusters aimed at teenage boys, with their sexless superheroes and disposable pretty women smiling on the sidelines." But it is to say that there's a very simple reason movies contain less and less sex: It's jarringly, miserably awkward -- awkward for actors, awkward for filmmakers and ultimately awkward for audience members.
Right? Can you really sit in a movie theater and watch explicit sexuality depicted without thinking, "Hmm. I wonder how the complete stranger next to me, or behind me, is judging my reaction to this. And how am I judging him/her?" After all, the communal experience we celebrate in filmgoing necessarily confers screen intimacy to the viewer; horror films resonate among opening-weekend crowds because subconsciously or not, that community is essential to the enjoyment of the experience. Knowing one's not alone in the face of graphic violence, torment, mortality and/or oblivion provides a reassurance that we don't instinctively seek as sexual creatures. We are not "neo-Puritans," to use Dargis' term; we are just selfish, repulsed by the idea of sharing (let alone evincing) anything close to arousal.
Obviously it wasn't always this way. T&A was once as integral to the slasher genre as masked killers themselves. But the context of such prurience -- sex as a prelude and perhaps even a catalyst to violent death -- is pretty outmoded today. Jaded younger audiences don't recognize that morality, and studios and filmmakers are smart to evolve (devolve?) to the purely visceral pleasures of bloodshed and flesh-rending. We don't have to wonder what our neighbors think of the ghastly demises in the Saw franchise, for example, because to the extent those viewers make up a support network of sorts, the absence of sex (mundane human behavior) adds a further degree of removal from the inhumanity onscreen. This is truly the movies' New Intimacy: Unknotting sex and violence for a generation for whom violence is fantastically sexy enough. And we don't have to squirm with discomfort over nudity that's so gratuitous as to be insulting.
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.