Contemporary Erotic Cinema

Douglas Keesey

• Publisher: Kamera Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781842433638
• eBook ISBN: 9781842436462
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

From Last Tango in Paris to American Pie to Brokeback Mountain—a look at more than 100 erotic films, with in-depth analysis and fascinating behind-the-scenes anecdotes

The first book to look at truly contemporary erotic cinema, this publication gives in-depth analyses of sex scenes from more than 100 films, more than half of them released in the 21st century. Beginning with an overview of how depictions of sex on screen have changed over the last 40 years, with particular attention to censorship controversies, the book is divided into three main parts—erotic genres, themes, and acts—and covers sex comedies, body horror, alien sex, and erotic animation; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans films, movies about youth, marriage, and infidelity; films dealing with incest, blasphemy, and death; on-screen nudity and voyeurism, masturbation, oral and anal sex, the ménage à trois, and the orgy; and bestiality, rape and sadomasochism. The films discussed include 9 Songs, Bad Education, Black Swan, Intimacy, Last Tango in Paris, The Reader, The Wayward Cloud, Y Tu Mamá También and many more.

EROTIC THEMES

ADDICTION

Shame (2011)

Director: Steve McQueen

Cast: Michael Fassbender (Brandon), Carey Mulligan (Sissy)

Brandon is a New York City yuppie who is outwardly happy and successful but secretly driven to feed his lust in an endless round of sex, shame and more sex to forget the shame. As director Steve McQueen has said, ‘Brandon is living in Manhattan in this metropolis of excess and Western freedom. He has a great job, he’s attractive, he has money. Within those possibilities, he creates a prison for himself through his activities with sex….A prison with no bars. Maybe it’s too much freedom.’57 Porn – the ‘filthy’ kind with ‘hos, sluts, anal, double anal’ – is readily available on his home and office computers, and Brandon is a chronic masturbator, jerking off in his apartment shower, his office toilet and anywhere else he can find to do it. He has compulsive intercourse with pick-ups and prostitutes, voraciously consuming each one before moving on to the next.

One day, though, his sister Sissy comes to stay with him and, when he overhears her having sex with his married boss in the next room, Brandon is horribly reminded of a trauma from their past, perhaps a time when he heard their father molesting her. After the boss leaves, Sissy enters Brandon’s room and gets into bed with him – maybe as she, prematurely sexualised, had done when they were children – prompting him to order her to ‘get the fuck out!’ If there was incestuous abuse – a precocious and improper intimacy in their family, this could account for the barrier Brandon has erected to separate flesh from feeling. He can have sex but it must be emotionless and anonymous, like the encounter he witnesses of a man screwing a woman from behind while she is pressed up against the glass of a hotel window. What should be a private act is deprived of intimacy and made public in front of his fascinated gaze, like his earlier traumatic hearing, or witnessing, of incestuous violation.

Yet, when Sissy catches him masturbating and when she discovers all the porn on his computer (with their obscene images reflected on her face), Brandon resolves to overcome his sex addiction for her sake, realising that his behaviour only perpetuates the sexual wound inflicted on her and himself when they were young. He goes on a real date with a woman from work, but when removing his clothes means letting his emotional guard down, too, he finds himself unable to get an erection. Later, taking a woman doggy-style up against a window, he has no trouble getting hard, for this – bestial and essentially predatory – is what sex has been to him, following on the pattern set for him long ago by his abusive father. But Brandon does not give up trying. He makes lewd advances to a woman in front of her boyfriend in an attempt to provoke an outside authority to step in and stop his predation. He presses a gay man into giving him head – something that, to Brandon, is apparently repugnant. (Was he forced to do this as a child?) He even screws two women in the same bed as if to thoroughly sate himself on female flesh. In the end, we see Brandon eyeing a woman on a subway train just as he was doing at the film’s beginning. Will he follow and fuck her, or remember his sister and resist the urge?

BISEXUALITY

Savage Nights (Les nuits fauves) (1992)

Director: Cyril Collard

Cast: Cyril Collard (Jean), Carlos López (Samy), Romane Bohringer (Laura)

On his ‘savage nights’, Jean has sex with multiple male partners in public cruising grounds. He also seduces an ostensibly straight rugby player, Samy, whose body turns him on. But then Jean meets Laura, a practically virginal teen with whom he engages in a romantic flirtation. The two make love but he doesn’t come, because for him passion is linked to homosexuality. Jean thus lives a life divided between hetero romance and same-sex passion: ‘I loved Laura, I loved Samy, loved the vices of my savage nights. Was I born so completely divided?’58

Perhaps owing to internalised homophobia, Jean does see sex with men as a ‘vice’ and, when he becomes infected with AIDS, the images of all those he has been with blur and meld into that of the virus. By contrast, Jean has unprotected sex with Laura because he believes that his virtuous love for her will cleanse him of his sins and prevent her from contracting the disease. However, as he soon realises, ‘I was a coward. I thought I was coming to Laura washed of the stains from my nights, while silently exposing her to the corruption of my blood. I was shooting my virus into her.’59 When Jean does tell her that he is HIV-positive and insists that they use a condom, he takes the first step towards integrating sex and romance, for, if he really loves her, he cannot deny her the truth about his body, which unavoidably affects hers as well.

Jean’s sexual experiences with others have contributed to his skill as a lover: ‘Laura doesn’t know the most sordid details of the depths my nights bring me to, but I know she senses those savage nights are the reason I can make her come like nobody else, because they’re a part of me.’60 Yet, despite having sex with Laura in one of his public cruising spots, Jean is unable to recapture with her the passion of his all-male encounters. For this reason, he continues to have casual sex with others, including the macho Samy. Jean seems to want Laura to have smaller breasts and to cut her hair, and she accuses Jean of imagining Samy while making love to her. But when Samy himself softens, beginning to drink herbal tea and declaring his love for Jean, Jean leaves him for more purely physical encounters with other men. The end of the film finds Jean looking (desirously?) at some young men while telling Laura (on the phone) that he loves her. Jean seems happy, as though he has somehow healed – or accepted – the split in his psyche, but has he? And, if so, how?

Kinsey (2004)

Director: Bill Condon

Cast: Liam Neeson (Kinsey), Peter Sarsgaard (Martin), Laura Linney (Mac)

Kinsey is a zoologist who begins researching and teaching courses in human sexuality. In this, he is opposed by Professor Thurman, who promotes abstinence using scare-tactic sex-ed films detailing the ravages of venereal disease. If sexually tempting thoughts keep him awake, Thurman tells his students, ‘I like to close my eyes and think of all the Johns I know. Well, not only Johns, sometimes Peters.’ The class laughs that Thurman could be so oblivious to his own double entendres, but these may also be slips of the tongue signifying repressed desires, particularly given that Thurman is played by actor Tim Curry, who starred as one of film history’s most famous bisexuals in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).

The ostensibly hetero Kinsey has also been tempted. When he was an Eagle Scout and when a boy his junior sought his help regarding lustful thoughts, Kinsey had the two of them pray rather than masturbate together. As a professor, Kinsey is quick to adopt an adoring student named Martin as his assistant. As Kinsey reads to his class from a list of sex questions – ‘Is it unusual for my boyfriend to touch my anus?’ – the film cuts to a shot of Martin standing behind Kinsey in a hint of gay desires still only in the back of his mind. In a later scene, the two men are half-naked as Kinsey stands behind Martin to show him that he’s been ‘using the wrong muscle group’ while digging in the garden. This moment of Adam and Steve in Eden is interrupted by the arrival of Kinsey’s wife, Mac, who brings with her a shaming gaze, making the men feel awkward about their nudity and closeness. Still later, after interviewing men in a gay bar, Kinsey and Martin share a hotel room. Martin emerges naked from the shower and only very gradually dons pyjamas. ‘I took maybe a little bit too long putting on my clothes,’ says actor Peter Sarsgaard. ‘I wanted to throw it out there to his character, like if you think I’m doing something, then I’m doing something; if you don’t think I’m doing something, I’m totally not doing something – I’m putting on my clothes and going to bed.’61 Martin’s seduction involves an appeal to Kinsey’s unconscious, asking whether he wants to acknowledge and act on his repressed homoerotic desires. In addition, the guilt-ridden Kinsey may be attracted to Martin because the younger man shows an uninhibited acceptance of his own body. Director Bill Condon has remarked upon actor Sarsgaard’s ‘incredible comfort with his own body and being naked….I don’t think I’ve met anybody who’s as comfortable in his own skin, just a great person to be around, the most open person.’62

The fact that Kinsey has sex with Martin that night does not establish Kinsey as a ‘closeted homosexual’ who finally ‘comes out’ as definitively ‘gay’. In addition to sleeping with Martin (who has feminine traits), Kinsey continues to make love with his wife, Mac (who has masculine attributes), and even engages in a threesome with Martin and a woman. In this film, the point of the ‘Kinsey scale’ – where 0 is exclusively hetero and 6 is exclusively homo – is that the vast majority of people are somewhere in the middle, sliding along a bisexual continuum of both/and rather than either/or. As Condon has said, ‘Kinsey’s basic idea… is that everyone’s sexuality is unique….for him there’s no freedom in defining yourself by your sexual acts’.63

DISABILITY

The Waterdance (1992)

Directors: Neal Jimenez, Michael Steinberg

Cast: Eric Stoltz (Joel), Helen Hunt (Anna)

After breaking his neck in a hiking accident, Joel is permanently paralysed from the waist down. With other paraplegics at the rehabilitation centre, he attends a sex therapy lecture where they are told that, while they can get an erection, it’s not likely to feel the same and that achieving orgasm is very rare. Feeling unmanned, the men turn their rage on each other. ‘You’re a little prick,’ one of them says to Joel, taunting him about the imminent loss of his girlfriend: ‘How long do you think it’s gonna take before that pretty little girl of yours leaves you for somebody who can tune her engine?’ Thinking of sexuality in the most conventionally masculine terms (of using a wrench on a car), the men fear that they lack the tool to do the job.

Co-director Neal Jimenez, himself a paraplegic, described the characters as ‘men having to redefine their manhood when their physical being is entirely changed’.64 When his girlfriend Anna kisses his hand and strokes his arm as he is lying in the hospital bed, Joel initially baulks. The passive position he is in feels unmanly (he is unused to her making the advances) and he considers himself ill-equipped to respond (his arm seems like a poor substitute for the organ that used to have more feeling). However, her persistence eventually leads him to take action by holding her face between his hands to passionately kiss her and then by reaching into her panties to masturbate her. This scene marks the first time in a mainstream film that a man has masturbated a woman to orgasm. It would seem that Hollywood, along with Joel, is discovering that there are equally valid forms of male sexual expression besides thrusting during intercourse. Later, in a hotel bed, as Anna lies on top of him, Joel has her sit up so that he can see her breasts: ‘I want to look at you.’ ‘The movie is erotic because, in Joel’s new body, he has to deal with the visual rather than the tactile,’ says Jimenez.65 For Joel, sight gains in importance as a mode of sexual response as the feeling in his penis lessens. The movie does not sentimentalise Joel’s changed bodily experience. He rages at the loss of what he once had: ‘My girlfriend, she touches me now and I don’t feel a thing. I feel nothing….I hate her for walking, for feeling.’ However, as Jimenez notes regarding the depiction of sexuality in the film, ‘We deal as much with possibility as we do with loss.’66

Elegy (2008)

Director: Isabel Coixet

Cast: Ben Kingsley (David), Penélope Cruz (Consuela), Dennis Hopper (George)

David is a divorced professor who indulges in a series of affairs with students. He seduces one such student, Consuela, by saying that she resembles the woman in Goya’s painting of The Nude Maja. As she lies beneath him in bed, her body displayed like Maja’s, he tells her, ‘You have the most beautiful breasts I’ve ever seen….And you have a beautiful face I can’t stop looking at. You’re a work of art.’ Does he praise her beauty just to get her naked, or is he finally discovering a woman’s face through her flesh? Art was supposed to be his alibi for sex. As his philandering friend George says, ‘Bifurcate your requirements: …look at all the Goyas that you want, but keep the sex part just for sex.’ David has always had a thing for breasts; women with beautiful ones became the instant object of his lust. (In fact, David once imagined himself transformed into a giant female breast.)67 But, in Consuela, David suddenly finds himself attracted to a beauty that is more than skin deep. Rather than tasting her flesh and then moving on to other mammalian treats, he misses her when they’re apart and jealously imagines her in the arms of rival men: ‘I knew it’s only a matter of time before a young man found her and took her away. I knew because I was once that young man who’d have done it.’ It is as though the ageing David splits into two selves, one with the maturity to appreciate Consuela’s whole being, and the other – his former self – just lusting after her breasts. But now that David is nearing emotional maturity, he fears that his physical body is no longer attractive to a young woman like Consuela. The relationship falters because he will not let himself be seen in public with her, so jealous is he of others’ youth and fearful of their eyes upon him, condemning him as too old for her. Age becomes his sexual disability.

Then Consuela is diagnosed with breast cancer and she asks David to photograph her before the surgery, telling him that ‘I never had a boyfriend who loved my body as much as you did.’ With this request, Consuela separates David from her other, more superficial lovers. Like them, David desired her for her flesh, but his was a love so deep it encompassed her whole being. She needs this love now, for her fear is that, when a part of her is gone, he will no longer be able to see her whole: ‘Will you still want to fuck me if I lose my breast? Will you be up for that?’ What if these body parts – the beautiful breast and the youthful erection so vitally important to their lovemaking – were gone? Can love survive the ravages of disease and the decay of old age? David does come to Consuela’s bedside following the mastectomy. It could be argued that the film flinches in not showing what her body now looks like, when it did show her breasts before. However, couldn’t it also be said that the missing part is of much less significance than what we do see, which is her face?

GAY

Sebastiane (1976)

Directors: Derek Jarman, Paul Humfress

Cast: Neil Kennedy (Max), Ken Hicks (Adrian), Janusz Romanov (Anthony), Leonardo Treviglio (Sebastian), Barney James (Severus)

AD 303. A group of Roman soldiers is encamped at an isolated outpost far from women and ‘civilisation’. Max taunts some of the other men for their homosexual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• EROTIC GENRES
• EROTIC THEMES
• EROTIC ACTS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• NOTES
• Plates
• Copyright