Provoc auteurs and Provocations

Screening Sex in 21st Century Media

Maria San Filippo

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253052155
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Twenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New distribution technologies enable and amplify these provocations, and encourage the branding of media creators as "provocauteurs" known for challenging sexual conventions and representational norms.

While such strategies may at times be no more than a profitable lure, the most probing and powerful instances of sexual provocation serve to illuminate, question, and transform our understanding of sex and sexuality. In Provoc auteurs and Provocations, award-winning author Maria San Filippo looks at the provocative in films, television series, web series and videos, entertainment industry publicity materials, and social media discourses and explores its potential to create alternative, even radical ways of screening sex.

Throughout this edgy volume, San Filipporeassesses troubling texts and divisive figures, examining controversial strategies—from "real sex" scenes to scandalous marketing campaigns to full-frontal nudity—to reveal the critical role that sexual provocation plays as an authorial signature and promotional strategy within the contemporary media landscape.

PART I

Provocations

ONE

Selling Sex

Scandalous Marketing Campaigns and the Millennial Watercooler Movie

The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination. . . . Pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body.

Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible

The time has come to think about sex. To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality.

Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”

SEX SELLS.

It is a timeless axiom, and one whose validity has repeatedly been proven in the market for screen media for nearly 125 years. Pornography—the genre that takes selling sex on-screen to its furthest extreme—has been a key driver of screen technology’s development and dissemination since cinema’s prehistory. As soon as he had settled that legendary bet for Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge turned his attention from horse locomotion to the movements of (mostly) female nudes documented in his studio photography series.¹ Two additional instances from the early days of motion pictures are illustrative: American cinema’s first “hit movie,” Thomas Edison’s church- and law-defying The Kiss (William Heise, 1896), and Mae West’s jailing on obscenity charges causing a surge in ticket sales for her Broadway show Sex, which paved the way for her hugely successful screen debut in She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933). Since cinema’s start, then, screening provocative sexual content has reliably delivered publicity and controversy, commodities frequently convertible into box office profits. “I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it,” West is known to have joked.

In addition to its vital role in the emergence and rapid popularity of the moving image, sex saved screen media once again, in the 1960s, when racy European “sexploitation” imports held at bay competition from television when other gimmicks in film production and exhibition (such as Cinerama, 3D, and Smell-O-Vision) failed. Likewise, of the three success-making strategies—“sex, swearing and respectability”—attributed to HBO’s (Home Box Office) domination of the cable television marketplace since its emergence in the 1970s, arguably the first of these was, and continues to be, the sharpest arrow in its quiver.² As chapter 2 will take up, now that the cable television revolution it instigated has waned, HBO continues to hone its sexploitation–meets–quality TV trademark to keep viewers watching and talking. Defying the dispersion of the audience wrought by what FX chairman John Langraf proclaimed in 2015 “peak TV,” HBO’s Game of Thrones (David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, 2011–19) became an irrepressible popular culture phenomenon in no small part because of its perfecting of “sexposition”—the term Myles McNutt coined to describe the series’ exaggeratedly prurient use of sex and nudity as backdrop during scenes of narrative exposition.³ As the coinage implies, sexposition is a strategy resurrected from sexploitation’s golden age and both Hollywood’s and cable TV’s appropriation of it for its own purposes of soft-core titillation.

However perennial, the notion that sex sells has gained renewed force in the digital era, which is characterized by an oversaturation of content in relation to available audiences. So addled are we by overuse of our devices and their domination of our attention that in 2018 New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo, furthering Landgraf’s warning, professed that we have reached (and possibly now exceeded) “peak screen.”⁴ Desperate to capture eyeballs and profits, 21st century media producers and products more than ever mobilize sexual provocation as an authorial signature and promotional strategy to stand out in the crowded, fragmented mediascape and marketplace.

As Muybridge’s studio photography evidenced, and as Jameson’s famous formulation quoted at chapter’s start reminds us, cinema developed out of the mutually reinforcing desires to see and to know.⁵ From the peephole pleasures made available by the kinetoscope at the turn of the 20th century to the home-viewing privacy realized first by the VHS/VCR revolution and subsequently by the internet and streaming, screens have served as delivery devices for, as often as not, erotically charged material that aims to provoke any number of responses: curiosity, desire, amazement, arousal, outrage, shock. Thinking about sex, as Gayle Rubin’s epigraph urges, may not seem high on the list of such intended effects, yet this exhibitionistic medium’s power to elicit a voyeuristic impulse with potent psychosexual underpinnings would inspire feminist film theory’s emergence and continue to drive reflections on cinema as a representational lens for imagining others and ourselves.⁶ While many recent deployments of sexual provocation may be on par with sexploitation’s sensationalism of the 1960s and 1970s in ultimately commodifying and containing whatever transgressive or subversive potential they might possess, the possibility always remains that these provocative artists and works may resist or undermine sexual hegemonies by provoking alternative ways of screening and imagining cultural logics of desire.

Seeking to recover the radical political force of the provocative, I explore here how provocations and provocauteurs challenge representational and ideological norms around sex and sexuality. Enabled by ever-expanding digital channels of production, distribution, and exhibition, and amplified by virtual forums (e.g., video-hosting sites and social media) for streaming and sharing, the media creators and texts I examine traverse media platforms and market niches, and in so doing transform inveterate cultural scripts to reflect the complexity and contingency of sexuality.

Consider how controversial campaigning and viral marketing work to sell not just film but filmgoing in the posttheatrical era, when movies are increasingly imperiled by competing content (from peak TV to video games to YouTube to TikTok). Scandal and sexually risqué lures are marketing strategies employed across the cinematic marketplace—from Hollywood studio fare to art and indie films—with the aim of producing what I term the millennial watercooler movie: a film that cuts through the clutter of content by provoking curiosity and controversy, a work that pushes the edge of what can be said or shown, about which it seems important to have an opinion. Jon Lewis notes that the “real sex films” in vogue in the first decade of the 21st century faced financial challenges due to their usually being theatrically releasable only on the film festival circuit and in the receding domain of the art house cinema, while their afterlives in ancillary markets also suffer as a result of restrictive practices by cable channels and distribution outlets. Thus, these films “are little seen but much talked about.”⁷

Lewis’s assessment has been complicated, however, by a media market that has grown far more complex, in which short-term profits are sometimes sacrificed in the interest of synergistic brand building or long-tail revenues. Even where the profit incentive lags, these works foster a revitalized market for provocative sexual representations that, for better or for worse, contributes to the “pornification” of popular culture and the mainstreaming of risqué sexual content. From cable TV’s sexposition to Fifty Shades of Grey’s multiplex-friendly BDSM, this type of content continually raises the bar for what is considered sexually shocking or scandalous on-screen.

A filmmaker’s resistance to making cuts to satisfy a ratings board can generate valuable publicity, as can “red-band” (R-rated) trailers ostensibly restricted to mature viewers but highly shareable online. Where a film’s commercial viability once depended on its receiving no more restrictive a rating than R (or its equivalent outside the United States), the decreased importance of theatrical exhibition for art and independent film means that receiving an NC-17 rating or forgoing a rating altogether no longer dooms a film. Indeed, an NC-17 rating may draw attention, as in the case of Blue Is the Warmest Color. While an extended rollout aimed at building anticipation for a strong opening weekend remains a central marketing strategy for almost all theatrically exhibited films, the tactic has in recent years been supplemented by the free publicity generated by provocative content, whether that content is as fleeting and frivolous as Ben Affleck’s “did you see it?” penis-sighting stunt for Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014), discussed below, or as narratively justified and representationally noteworthy as the six minutes of screen time that fortysomething Julie Delpy spends topless in Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, 2013). The millennial watercooler movie, then, runs counter both to the blockbuster logic of saturation advertising and opening weekend determinism and to Netflix’s algorithm-dependent strategy of dumping huge chunks of original programming, and demonstrates that word of mouth, often driven by online buzz, remains an effective publicity strategy.

An outpouring of recent scholarship has explored screenings of sex deemed extreme, perverse, transgressive, and radical.⁸ In venturing into the conversation, I arrive indebted to many scholars, but most of all to pornography studies pioneer Linda Williams, particularly for her deeply considered, steadfast assertion of the ideologically resistant potential of naturalistic screen representations of sex. This book aspires to heed Williams’s call for “on/scenities”—“gestures[s] by which a culture brings on to the public scene the very organs, acts, ‘bodies and pleasures’ that have heretofore been designated ob-off-scene, that is, needing to be kept out of view”—and to join in actively refusing “the continued avoidance of the emotional nature and physical specificity of the sex acts that so importantly punctuate our public and private lives.”⁹

The chapters in this book make no attempt to comprehensively cover sexually provocative content; rather, they examine exemplary case studies of sexual provocation in four (sometimes overlapping) categories of contemporary screen media. These categories are (1) mainstream Hollywood-produced and/or -distributed feature films with relatively large budgets and stars; (2) global art cinema, which is increasingly funded by transnational coproduction financing and supplementary public support and entrenched in international film festival economies; (3) US indie filmmaking, which is produced through private financing ventures and dependent on festival and (semi-)independent distribution networks; and (4) television and web series, here encompassing a fairly modest range of basic/premium cable and original online content. I exclude pornography, which exists in a parallel orbit of production and reception cultures that calls for its own coordinated approach. Yet the delineation between art and porn needs troubling, especially as traditional signifiers of pornography (such as erect penises, “money shots,” and unsimulated sex) also appear in contemporary art cinema. “The art-sex picture has blossomed so fully it is nearly its own genre,” as critic Richard Corliss noted in 2001.¹⁰ Not since the 1960s has the association between art cinema and sexuality seemed so close and so productive. Chapters 2 and 3 parse the work of Alain Guiraudie and Catherine Breillat, provocauteurs who straddle the line between art film and pornography.

Tanya Krzywinska observes that art cinema “often uses the provocation of transgression as a means to lure an audience” even when films are “not particularly transgressive.”¹¹ This discrepancy may arise from misleading sexploitation-style marketing that promises explicit content where there is little to none or from the use of sexually explicit content to ultimately conservative ends. Miramax, the corporate creation of the now disgraced Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob, frequently worked the former strategy, beginning with the title of its first hit, sex, lies, and videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989), to promote films with titillating imagery often at odds with their tone and content.¹² One of the more sexually provocative films of recent years, Bang Gang (Eva Husson, 2015), takes the latter tack, presenting extended scenes of orgiastic hedonism among French teens only to offer up a conclusion that manages to be both moral...