Space Invader: The Sex Issue
Laying it all bare in these chasten times at the movies.
The Tip Sheet is spinning off. Introducing Space Invaders, a newsletter about movies and pop culture that invades this space on Saturday. Arrives irregularly during this pilot phase.
At the end of Twisters, “tornado wrangler” Glen Powell drops meteorologist Daisy Edgar-Jones off at the airport. They spent the movie chasing their attraction to each other almost as often as they were chasing the titular tornados, and in this emotional charged moment, Jones’ character quotes Powell’s tagline back at him, “If you feel it, chase it.”
So what happens next?
If you guessed that he follows her into the airport terminal where they…. have a conversation, you would be correct.
The “kiss that never happened” may be the one blemish on a surprising summer success. It’s the character pay-off you’re expecting but you never get it, but it’s also indictive of a larger cultural conversation about the state of movies in 2024: Where’s all the sex?
Last fall, a study from UCLA found that American viewers between the ages of 10 and 24 wanted to see less sex onscreen; 51 per cent said that they wanted to see more content about platonic relationships and friendships, 47.5 per cent said that sex “isn’t needed” for most TV shows and movies, and 44 per cent said that they felt romance is “overused” as a plot device.
“We know that young people are suffering an epidemic of loneliness and they’re seeking modeling in the art they consume. While some storytellers use sex and romance as a shortcut to character connection, it’s important for Hollywood to recognize that adolescents want stories that reflect the full spectrum of relationships,” said Dr. Yalda T. Uhls, co-author of the study, and adjunct professor in UCLA’s psychology department.
It's an interesting conundrum, isn’t it? We have this social movement to embrace all types of sexuality and gender-expression, but at the same time there’s a very loud call to abstinence and chastity. In the past, these things have come in waves; the progress on LGBTQ+ rights and women’s lib in the late 60s and early 70s was followed by the rise of the so-called Moral Majority, but there was a transition period. They didn’t seem to co-exist together, and they certainly weren’t expressed together in culture.
But consider the current political moment in the United States, where the loudest voices for traditional gender roles and the nuclear family have fallen behind a leader who’s past includes multiple marriages and multiple extra-marital dalliances with, among many others, a Playboy model and an adult film actress. Consider Jerry Falwell Jr., the namesake of the originator of the Moral Majority, who lost his perch after revelations about what goes on in his bedroom, or the Zieglers from Florida, activists with Moms’ For Liberty, who hate queer representation in schools but love sex with multiple partners.
This friction between what people say and what they do is baked into the cultural cake in America, even in Hollywood. In Damien Chazelle’s Babylon we see how things transition from the 1920s with its Dionysian excess and debauchery to become something more conservative once movies are absorbed by the American corporate machine. That hasn’t gone away in the decades since because for all the talk about “liberal Hollywood”, it has some very conservative values.
These inconsistencies were laid bare almost 20 years ago in Kirby Dick's documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated. The film explains the difference in the way that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) hands out movie ratings, often treating depictions of sex and nudity more severely than scenes of graphic violence.
One of the examples Kirby used was the seminal 1999 drama Boys Don't Cry, Kimberley Peirce’s bio-drama about the life of Brandon Teena, a trans man who was killed in a hate crime in rural Nebraska in 1993. The movie was tagged with a commercially unviable NC-17 rating but it wasn’t for the scene that depicts Teena’s brutal sexual assault and murder, but for an earlier scene where Teena and his girlfriend are making love and the camera lingers a little too long on her pleasure.
Another instance was Jamie Babbit’s But I'm A Cheerleader, which was given an NC-17 for featuring a scene where a gay teen tries to perform self-pleasure on herself and fails. That film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival just a few weeks after American Pie – and its scene featuring a teenager getting intimate with a freshly baked pastry – became a box office success with an R-rating.
In the case of violence though, it seems like anything goes at the movies, which is something that researchers have made a note of. An analysis of movies at the Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2017 confirmed an earlier study that showed portrayals of gun violence in top-grossing PG-13 movies had more than doubled from 1985 through 2012, and then they went further by showing that there was more gun violence in PG-13 movies than there were in ones rated R.
“What increasingly differentiates the instances of gun violence in PG-13 films from those rated R is not only the higher frequency in the PG-13 category but also those films’ erasure of the consequences (e.g., blood and suffering) and greater likelihood that the violence will be perpetrated by or on comic book-inspired heroes and antiheroes (e.g., Batman, Avengers, and X-Men),” researchers said.
The indictment is clear, the MPAA makes it harder to see depictions of sex positive experiences while in the company of a parent or guardian than it is to see drastic acts of vicious, albeit bloodless, violence without adult supervision.
And over the last decade the movie business has oriented itself more and more to the sexless and bloodless type of four quadrant blockbuster, usually led by a superhero or a character whose broad characteristics could classify them as a superhero. Mid-budget adult dramas, when they do get made, tend to be released on a streaming platform, or they’re stretched out to into a series like the recently completed AppleTV+ show Presumed Innocent, which had already been made into a film in 1990 by Alan J. Pakula.
But does the blame entirely fall on content creators?
The #MeToo revelations painted a picture of Hollywood where sex is used as a weapon by the powerful to afflict, intimidate or undermine the less powerful. The rise of internet porn culture has meant that titillation isn’t enough anymore; there’s no market for direct-to-video erotic thrillers that like to tease while telling a story, and the existence of sites like Mr. Skin eliminate context and make sex the sole focus of an actress’ performance. If you can commodify the bodies of actresses this far, then it shouldn’t have been surprising when someone hacked intimate photos belonging to several of those actresses from a cloud server and then released them to the public without malice aforethought.
So it’s complicated, and it’s not like the cinema is completely sexless. Last summer, Jennifer Lawrence got into a fist fight in her birthday suit in No Hard Feelings, the romance between a fake assassin and his would-be client got hot and heavy at times in Hit Man, and Emma Stone got her second Oscar playing a sexually liberated female Frankenstein in Poor Things.
On other hand, maybe our definitions of sex are just too reductive. Challengers is a sexy movie, but there isn’t a lot of sex in it, and even most of the nudity is in the context of a locker room or a sauna. Why? Because tennis is the sex in Challengers. The grunting, the sweating, the impressive feats of physicality all set to a propulsive EDM soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and it even ends with the two star tennis pros cuddling. Maybe it’s not the sex we’re missing, it’s the exhilaration.
Twisters is now available on premium VOD and it remains a theatre near you. Challengers is available to rent and buy on Apple, Amazon and Cineplex.
The Bookshelf:
Didi
Longlegs (Wed, Thurs)
Galaxy Cinemas – Woodlawn:
Afraid
Alien: Romulus
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure – 35th Anniversary
Blink Twice (thru Wed)
Callas – Paris, 1958 (Sun, Thurs)
Coraline (Sun-Mon)
The Crow (thru Wed)
Deadpool & Wolverine
Despicable Me 4
Inside Out 2 (Sun-Tues)
It Ends with Us
Stree 2
Twisters
Starting Thursday: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Galaxy Cinemas – Clair:
Temporarily closed due to flood damage.
Mustang Drive-In (open weekends):
It Ends with Us (early show)
Twisters (late show)
Fly Me to the Moon (later show)
Princess Cinemas – Twin:
Between the Temples
Callas – Paris, 1958 (Sat-Sun, Tues)
Sing Sing
Trap
Princess Cinemas – Original:
Caligula – The Ultimate Cut (Sat-Sun, Wed)
My Penguin Friend (Sat-Sun, Tues)
Paris, Texas – 40th Anniversary (Fri)
Strange Darling (Sat-Tues)
Apollo Cinema:
2024 Cat Video Fest (Sat-Sun, Tues)
Didi (Sat-Mon)
Fight Club (Sun, Thurs)
G.O.A.T., The Greatest of All Time (Wed-Fri)
Saripodhaa Sanivaaram (Sat, Tues)
Vaazha – Biopic of a Billion Boys (Sat-Mon)
This week on End Credits, Candice Page co-hosts as we head back into space, where no one can hear you scream, but they can hear you rave! We’re going to talk about the hit new take on a sci-fi institution with Federico Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, and we’re also going to talk about some of the overlooked and underappreciated movies that came out this summer.
And finally, feel free to reach out to me by email at adamadonaldson [at] gmail [dot] com, or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, GuelphPolitico.ca!