Affective Sexual Pedagogies in Film and Television

Kyra Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367875787
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317310778
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Popular film and television hold valuable potential for learning about sex and sexuality beyond the information-based model of sex education currently in schools. This book argues that the representation of complicated—or "messy"—relationships in these popular cultural forms makes them potent as affective pedagogical moments. It endeavours to develop new sexual literacies by contemplating how pedagogical moments, that is, fleeting moments which disrupt expectations or create discomfort, might enrich the available discourses of sexuality and gender, especially those available to adolescents. In Part One, Clarke critiques the heteronormative discourses of sex education that produce youth in particularly gendered ways, noting that "rationality" is often expected to govern experiences that are embodied and arguably inherently incoherent. Part Two explores public intimacy, contemplating the often overlapping and confused boundaries between public and private.

1 Beyond Repetitive Endings

Teen Film, Fake Orgasm and Performance in Easy A

Figure 1.1 The shot pauses as Olive (Emma Stone) and Todd (Penn Badgley) ride away on Todd’s neighbour’s lawnmower. Screenshot from Easy A. 2010. Directed by Will Gluck. USA: Screen Gems, Olive Bridge Entertainment.

Ending Embrace: Narrative Conclusions and Fake Orgasms

As the aspersions cast on her reputation come to a head, Olive (Emma Stone) arranges to perform at a school pep rally,¹ to market her website freeolive.com. Love interest Todd (Penn Badgley) organises for the band to play ‘the sexiest song in their repertoire’, “Knock on Wood” (Eddie Floyd 1966), and Olive, dressed in a corset, hotpants and fishnets with a red feather boa, emerges from a wood pile brought in by Todd. Olive ends this performance by suggesting she is going to have sex with Todd, who she stripped from his costume as the school mascot—a woodchuck—to a half-naked blue devil, stating ‘would you prefer to be here watching the Woodchucks, or watch me do one?’ The film cuts to the conclusion of Olive’s webcast confession, in which she attempts to set the record straight, revisiting the events of the previous two weeks. The shot is taken from behind Olive’s shoulder, watching the webcast on the computer screen. As Olive talks, young men are shown watching the webcast at a basketball game, in a bedroom, and on a phone crossing the street. Olive states, ‘here you all are, waiting outside the bedroom door for me to kiss Todd, listening to me pretend to have sex with Brandon, paying me to lie for you, and calling me every name in the book.’ Her teacher Mr Griffiths (Thomas Haden Church) is shown watching, as Olive continues ‘and you know what, it was just like Hester in The Scarlet Letter …’ Mr Griffiths smiles and nods at her comment. Watching on a laptop downstairs in their house, Olive’s parents (Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci) also smile as she continues, ‘except that that’s the one thing the movies don’t tell you, how shitty it feels to be an outcast, warranted or not.’ As Olive finishes this statement, viewers hear the opening chords of The Simple Minds’ song “Don’t You (Forget about Me)” (1984), the song with which John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985) concludes. Looking down from Olive’s bedroom window, Todd is shown standing on a red ride-on lawnmower, holding speakers above his head. Viewers alternate between looking up at Olive in her window from behind Todd’s shoulder, and looking down at Todd from behind Olive’s head. Olive asks, ‘How did you know I love that song?’ While Olive explains she is still doing the webcast, Todd replies, ‘Screw ’em they’ve had enough of you, figuratively speaking, I ah, borrowed my neighbour’s mower, I came right over.’ They joke and Olive laughs, ‘I’ll be right down.’ Looking at the webcam, Olive explains, ‘That’s Todd, not that I owe you guys any more confessions, but um, I really like this guy and ah, I might even lose my virginity to him.’ Brandon (Dan Byrd) is shown watching, smiling, lying on a bed, while Olive’s younger adopted brother (Bryce Clyde Jenkins) raises his eyebrows. Olive continues, ‘I don’t know when it will happen, you know, it might be five minutes from now or tonight, or six months from now or on our wedding night, but the really amazing thing is, it is nobody’s God damn business.’ She smiles and runs away from the computer, towards the bedroom door. A series of shots show her male viewers, including a pastor, angry at her disappearance and their thwarted expectations: ‘I thought she was going to take her clothes off, Demi Moore took her clothes off.’ We also see her more sympathetic viewers, her peer Marianne (Amanda Bynes) touches the cross that hangs around her neck and Olive’s best friend Rhiannon (Aly Michalka) looks at her phone and the camera slowly pans to a close-up of the message it contains: ‘Rhi- Sorry I lied to you.’ When the camera cuts back to Rhiannon’s face she looks as though she is crying. In Brandon’s room, an African American man comes and lies behind him, running his fingers through his hair, and they smile as they watch a scene from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939). From Olive’s bedroom window the camera pans, looking down as Olive runs out of the house with a screech of joy and jumps into Todd’s arms. He spins her around and then puts her down, and they embrace and kiss with the sun behind them producing a romantic glow. They climb on the lawnmower and, holding their fists in the air, ride away (see Figure 1.1). The image pauses, as in the ending of The Breakfast Club, and a punk version of the same song begins, altering the lyrics to include an additional demand, ‘Don’t you forget about me, suckers’ as Olive and Todd are shown slowly driving the lawnmower up the hill away from her house.

There is something odd about Easy A’s (2010) normative ending. In concluding with a kiss—a romantic sign that signals the conclusion of the narrative and implies that the characters will live happily-ever-after—Easy A seems heteronormative; Olive reinstates her good girl status and begins a relationship with Todd, intimating future marriage. And yet, this happy ending is undermined by significant elements of the narrative. Directed by Will Gluck, Easy A is framed by Olive’s webcast as she narrates her story from her bedroom. Cutting between the webcast footage and enacted events of that same narrative, Olive recounts her lie that she had a date to get out of camping with her best friend Rhiannon’s family. At school the next week, Rhiannon quickly assumes she had sex and Olive reluctantly agrees in what constitutes her second lie to her best friend. Their conversation is overheard by a Christian peer, Marianne, who disciplines Olive by spreading the rumour that Olive had sex throughout the school. As the film progresses, Olive’s sympathy for Brandon, who identifies as gay, leads to Olive agreeing to perform sex with Brandon at a party, assisting Brandon to pass as heterosexual and ‘a man’. Capitalising on her newfound notoriety, Olive is then asked to help the numerous young men who fail to conform to expectations of masculinity, and they pay her with gift cards for the ability to spread rumours they were intimate with her. In sharing Olive’s version of events, from the privacy of her bedroom, Easy A may be perceived as a public diary. Indeed, Olive’s website exacerbates this intimacy; freeolive.com both symbolises her desire to become free of the rumours of her reported sexuality and implies free pornography. While Olive suggests to the pep rally audience that she will have sex with Todd in this ending, Olive replaces the “happy ending” of orgasm with the happy ending of the romantic comedy. In this chapter I argue the ending may even be considered “fake”, merely repeating other texts and conventions.

As a romantic comedy and teen film, this heteronormative ending is predictable: Celestino Deleyto (1998, 40) notes that ‘the intense focus of romantic comedy on gender relationships … means that its endings are almost universally placed within the context of a stable union of the heterosexual romantic couple’, that is, a ‘happy ending’. However, by deconstructing this moment in relation to the rest of the text, it is possible to recognise the challenges to convention that are implied. Endings are perceived as holding the potential to ‘embody the ideological stance of the text’ (Deleyto 1998, 39) and yet this ideological stance is undermined by the multiple ways in which a text may be read. Considering textual interpretation, David Bordwell suggests that ‘the film’s ending plays a summarizing role in ordinary comprehension. … And the ending offers great freedom of interpretation because critics have available several heuristics for making it mean’ (1989, 192). This is particularly the case in art cinema which is known to offer ‘open endings’ or leave issues ‘deliberately … unresolved’ (Klinger 2010, 136). Indeed, Bordwell suggests that ‘the interpreter may find a diegetically “closed” film semantically “open”’ (1989, 193). This tendency towards open readings may be found in the intertextual form of the film itself. Writing of melodrama, Christina Gledhill suggests as ‘a form founded on plagiarism, the notion of an original or singular meaning is particularly inappropriate’ (2000, 225). Indeed Roz Kaveney suggests the teen genre is a ‘metatextual endeavour’ (2006, 10) and such conventions of subtext appear to be alluded to as Olive, Rhiannon and Mr Griffiths discuss the innuendo surrounding the term “climax” in the film’s opening. This chapter explores Easy A’s intertextual repetition and particularly its connection to a history of teen film, but this repetition also highlights that endings may be rendered inconclusive by the multiple readings which may be made of a text.

In exploring this repetition, I consider two significant elements of the narrative. Firstly, Olive’s lie to Rhiannon is central to the plot, prioritising their friendship within the film. While it has been suggested that ‘pleasure in the “progress of romance” lies in the solution to the narrative problems, and the affirmation of the desire to see “love conquering all”’ (Pearce and Stacey 1995, 16), I argue that the major obstacle to be overcome here does not reside with the love interest. Todd asked Olive to lie for him when they were twelve as he was too scared to kiss her and consequently Todd never believes the rumours about Olive’s reputation. Indeed, it may be the fact that the romantic ending is never in jeopardy that leads Christina Zwarg to suggest in an analysis of the film that Olive’s reputation is ‘never really tarnished’ (2011, 219). In this way, the “happy ending” between Olive and Todd distracts from the real relationship at stake here, that between Olive and Rhiannon. Secondly, I argue that the rumours that surround Olive’s reputation and her performative sex with Brandon centre the concept of passing within the narrative and thus foreground the complex intimacies between Rhiannon and Olive which are left open in this heteronormative ending. That is, I consider the ending of Easy A as performative, undermining the forward momentum of the heteronormative conclusion, and, in its repetition, focussing viewers on the present.

In ‘superficially’ wrapping up the romance ending but leaving open issues of friendship, Olive’s reputation, and the inequalities posed by the sexual double standard, viewers may be encouraged to question Easy A’s “happy ending” (Bordwell 1989, 194). Such analysis has held a significant role in feminist film criticism, with viewers encouraged to seek ‘narrative inconsistency … to elaborate and make visible the cracks in the supposedly airtight case that is male-dominant imagery’ (Walters 1995, 75). Considering the way in which women are often recuperated in the closure of the ‘classic Hollywood narrative’, and restored to a ‘“normative” female role’ (Kuhn 1982, 34) Annette Kuhn suggests that this attempt at recuperation is not always successful, ‘particularly in cases where the narrative sets up questions that cannot be contained by any form of closure’ (35). In determining this ‘excess’, Suzanna Danuta Walters (1995) notes

the practice of ‘reading against the grain,’ where films or television shows are ‘read’ for their absences and ruptures in an attempt to reveal the internal contradictions and produce a reading or interpretation that challenges both the dominant reading of the film and its coherency and closure. (71)

However, Walters warns ‘we must be careful not to “find” resistance and ideological slippage under every apparently hegemonic rock of popular culture, simply because we want it to be there’ suggesting the need to ‘expos[e] the male-centered plots of popular culture as well as that of constructing alternative readings which tell a more empowering story’ (78). In ending the film with an embrace, Easy A repeats a convention of romance and the romantic comedy, and yet it seems fake, unreal, overborne, a ruse to which we return. In this chapter I explore the excesses that appear to undermine this ending and leave doubt in the mind of the viewer, drawing from Annamarie Jagose’s (2013) theory of fake orgasm to consider the ways intimacy is performed and distanced in Easy A.

The film’s ending, with its suggestion of pornography and orgasm, can be linked to the teleology of sex, the “orgasmic” ending perceived as the natural conclusion of narrative. The climax is significant to narrative structure, providing, as Jagose (2013, 207) writes, ‘both a sexual and a story payoff’ and here, I draw an analogy between the romantic ending of Easy A and fake orgasm. In Orgasmology, Jagose considers the twentieth-century orgasm, suggesting that while in queer theorisations orgasm has been perceived as normative, it is unpredictable and should be viewed as ‘a complexly contradictory formation, potentially disruptive of many of the sedimenting critical frameworks by which we have grown accustomed to apprehending sexuality’ (xii–xiii). Jagose considers the multiple contradictions inherent in the idea of orgasm, at once ‘biological and cultural, representable and unrepresentable, as well as personal and impersonal’ (34). Just as multiple interpretations may be made of texts and characters, so too orgasm refuses definition and may be understood in conflicting ways. Fake orgasm has been perceived as ‘unfeminist’ (177), dominated by an emphasis on ‘male sexual gratification, the masculinist measure of which can be seen in its indifference to securing female pleasure’ and foregrounding heterosexuality (196–97). Indeed, Jagose writes ‘insofar as the fake orgasm fakes orgasm, it has tended to be read as a poor semblance of the real thing’ (197). Instead, Jagose suggests that ‘fake orgasm needs to be conceptualized outside … the logics of deceit … or dissatisfaction’ and argues that

if … we resist classifying fake orgasm as a problem … it is possible to recognize fake orgasm as a sexual practice in its own right. … Fake orgasm, therefore, is not simply the simulation of orgasm but a dense complex of effects enfolding an indexically female, twentieth-century heterosexual practice that, by putting into prominent circulation the problem of the legibility of sexual pleasure, troubles the presumed truth or authenticity of sex itself, recognizes that norms are self-reflexively inhabited by a wider range of social actors than is commonly presumed, and asks us to rethink the conditions of legibility for political agency. (205–06)

As a repetitive performance, fake orgasm is ‘impersonal’, requiring a conscious performance of intimacy and thus undermining the discourses of truth and authenticity that surround intimacy (197–98). I start this chapter by exploring the textual repetition within Easy A and the ways it pulls the text in multiple directions, suggesting that this repetition may call into question the sincerity of intimate moments. Following a discussion of the role of the webcast in the film, I move to explore the concept of passing, considering Olive’s construction as a slut and the possibilities passing offers for undermining perceptions of authenticity, creating deception and placing definite understanding in question. While in many ways Easy A may be perceived as a normative teen film, I argue there are possibilities for perceiving moments of transgression, even in films with the most normative endings.

Repeating Endings: Intertexuality ‘with a Vengeance’²

The ending of Easy A is deliberately heteronormative and romantic: girl gets boy is clearly apparent as they drive off into the sunset. There is pleasure to be found in the ending that repeats a tradition of endings. Indeed, while recognising the critiques of romance, Lynne Pearce and Jackie Stacey (1995, 12) suggest that ‘we may (as individuals, as communities, as nations) no longer believe in love, but we still fall for it’ with the survival of romance resting in

its narrativity. In the same way that romantic love may be thought of as the phenomenon which … is ‘always already written’, so it is liable to perpetual re-writing; and it is its capacity for ‘re-scripting’ that has enabled it to flourish at the same time that it has been transformed.

While genres such as romance repeat, that does not mean the genre does not develop (Neale 2012, 189–90). Indeed, Gledhill notes that genres move beyond their fictional boundaries and ‘cross into cultural and critical discourse, where we – as audiences, scholars, students, and critics – make and remake them’ (2000, 241). More than simply unrealistic, in failing to acknowledge what might come after this ending of the romance (Lapsley and Westlake 1992, 43), Stevi Jackson (1995, 53–54) suggests that the endings of romance narratives indicate that ‘the excitement lies in the chase’ with the happy ending enabling enjoyment of that excitement ‘without having to confront the failing and routinization of romantic passion’. The ending of Easy A retells stories and appears to be hyper-conscious of the manipulation of narrative and conventions, and it is this repetition which I reflect upon in this section.

Repetition is not only endemic within romance; as a particularly intertextual film, Easy A draws from and explicitly repeats nineteenth-century novels and eighties teen films. Noting the importance of repetition to the teen film genre, Catherine Driscoll suggests that ‘teen film works largely by telling us things we already know about characters and situations that we are presumed to instantly recognize’ (2011, 83). Indeed, Easy A is clearly situated within a history of teen film; it opens with an anthropology shot³ that sets up the school as composed of different groups, and Olive’s narration that highlights the clichéd premise of the film:

I used to be anonymous, invisible to the opposite sex. … Pretty cutting edge stuff, huh? A high school girl feeling anonymous, who am I, what does it all mean, why am I here? Blah. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those tales.

Central to this portrayal is sexuality, her invi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Pedagogical Moments
• 1 Beyond Repetitive Endings: Teen Film, Fake Orgasm and Performance in Easy A
• 2 Becoming Pregnant: Girlhood, Responsibility and “Irrationality” in Juno
• 3 Constructing Virginity: Religion, Secularism and Abstinence in Looking for Alibrandi and The Rage in Placid Lake
• 4 Touching Fingers, Touching Lips: Exploring Heteronormativity, Affect and Queer Relationships in Glee
• 5 Flirting with Uncertainty: Disability, Communication and Challenging Normal in The Black Balloon
• 6 Uncomfortable Feelings: Grief, Hospitality and Belonging in Skins
• Bibliography
• Index