The Space of Sex

The Porn Aesthetic in Contemporary Film and Television

Shelton Waldrep

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781501377365
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501333064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

As film and television become ever more focused on the pornographic gaze of the camera, the human body undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming both landscape and building, part of an architectonic design in which the erotics of the body spread beyond the body itself to influence the design of the film or televisual shot. The body becomes the mise-en-scène of contemporary moving imagery. Opening The Space of Sex, Shelton Waldrep sets up some important tropes for the book: the movement between high and low art; the emphasis on the body, looking, and framing; the general intermedial and interdisciplinary methodology of the book as a whole.

The Space of Sex's second half focuses on how sex, gender, and sexuality are represented in several recent films, including Paul Schrader's The Canyons (2013), Oliver Stone's Savages (2012), Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike (2012), Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Don Jon (2013). Each of these mainstream or independent movies, and several more, are examined for the ways they have attempted to absorb pornography, if not the pornography industry specifically, into their plot. According to Waldrep, the utopian elements of seventies porn get reprocessed in a complex way in the twenty-first century as both a utopian impulse-the desire to have sex on the screen, to re-eroticize sex as something positive and lacking in shame-with a mixed feeling about pornography itself, with an industry that can be seen in a dystopian light. In other words, sex, in our contemporary world, still does not come without compromise.

Part One

Topographies of Desire

1

Framing the Image: The Female Body in Late Kubrick

The cinema of Stanley Kubrick is filled with symmetry, tableaux vivants, and various kinds of static moments that emphasize his origins in still photography. From his famous image of a newspaper vendor reacting to the death of FDR that he sold to Look magazine as a high school student to his insistence at the end of his career that the VHS versions of his films should be released whenever possible in “full frame” mode (i.e., 1.33 aspect ratio), Kubrick’s eye behind the camera was very much that of a still photographer.¹ Many of his most famous compositions emphasized their origins in paintings or photographs by other artists—whether the still images from Barry Lyndon (1975) that echo French and English eighteenth-century portraiture or the Diane Arbus-like ghost girls of The Shining (1980).² Quotations to visual art are everywhere in Kubrick, sometimes obliquely as in the references to Goya in the same film or to Man Ray in Killer’s Kiss (1955). Like Edvard Munch’s paintings, Kubrick’s films often seem to be filmed tableaux, ones in which the viewer is aware of something being framed (Sørnes 50). Even when Kubrick creates a signature moving image, such as the blood gushing from the elevator doors in The Shining, the scene emphasizes the lack of movement of the camera—that something, or someone, is remaining fixed and still. Kubrick returns to the aesthetics of the still camera again and again as a way to set up meaning in his films, especially in the repetition of images of the body—twins that don’t quite match up; female and male bodies that transpose; vertical bodies and those that are supine. The voyeuristic quality of the still image—its documentary aspect, if you will—begins to change with Kubrick’s posthumous Eyes Wide Shut (1999) to become a meditation on looking itself, film as a form of not knowing—willed ignorance that shuts out as many interpretations as it allows and that explores what the camera doesn’t see as much as what it does. Self-consciously linking this point of view to the male gaze, the exploration of the notion of gendered looking that Kubrick begins at the end of Full Metal Jacket (1987) comes to fruition in Eyes Wide Shut as the film bifurcates between two different ways of seeing sex and the body itself ³ (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Grady sisters. The Shining. Stanley Kubrick. 1980. Warner Brothers.

There is about Kubrick’s films a certain walled-off quality, as though they are self-contained and airless, almost claustrophobic, in their ability to create a world parallel to but different from our own. In these worlds, everything seemingly has meaning—from the colors we see to the dialogue and the movements of the actors. All elements of filmmaking have been not only well-considered but exhaustively so. It is difficult not to imagine authorial intention in almost everything that Kubrick created and small details loom large. Further magnifying this approach to his work is the fact that Kubrick tends to repeat compositions throughout his oeuvre, emphasizing the self-conscious nature of his work but also his tendency to cannibalize his own past, further emphasizing its hermetic nature. His tendency to repeat images stretches throughout his career and binds his many diverse films together. A trippy nighttime voyage through the streets of New York in Killer’s Kiss becomes the infamous “stargate” sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) many years later. The famous fight sequence in the mannequin factory at the conclusion of Killer’s Kiss is likewise subtly echoed in 2001 when HAL silently observes that Dave Bowman has made the critical mistake of leaving his helmet on board the Discovery. His dangling helmet, without a body, is one of the many uncanny images suggesting connections between man and machine or man and his many anatomical others (Figures 1.2 and 1.3).

Figure 1.2 Street at night. The Killer’s Kiss. Stanley Kubrick. 1955. United Artists.

Figure 1.3 Stargate. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick. 1968. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

It has only been during the time since his death that we have seen some of the many photos that he took prior to his making films and been able to assess his skill as a still photographer. His compositional ability is, not surprisingly, striking and often mirrors the balanced compositions of classical painting in his ability to compress narrative details into a single image. As Elvis Mitchell writes, “almost any still from his monochromatic movies tells a complete story” (2). The most telling example of this ability is the development of Kubrick’s first significant film, the short “Day of the Fight” (1951), which tells the story of the amateur boxer Walter Cartier as he spends a day getting ready for a major fight in the evening. Of Kubrick’s four first films—two other shorts and the disappointing first feature, Fear and Desire (1953), which Kubrick later disowned—“Day of the Fight” seems fairly satisfying and contains numerous images, tableaux, and motifs that would show up in later films—especially in the film that was arguably the most important trope or turn in his oeuvre, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Indeed, along with the first full-length film that Kubrick was somewhat satisfied with, Killer’s Kiss in 1955, “Day of the Fight” provides much of Kubrick’s visual vocabulary in his most famous films from the second half of his career.

“Day of the Fight” is also the only film by Kubrick that began as a series of still shots: a photo-story in Look magazine in 1949. To some extent this film allows Kubrick to set the still images in motion, recreating some static shots from the layout in the film. On the other hand, the film also allows Kubrick clearly to expand on narrative, and many of Kubrick’s later images are already signaled here. The boxing motif of “Day of the Fight” was to be recreated, to some extent, in Killer’s Kiss, which one might say is in part a fictionalized retelling of the same story from the Look photos. At the heart of all of Kubrick’s films is the tension of the one-on-one standoff between two adversaries— literally and symbolically represented by the boxing motif. Every film is built on a central conflict in which two people are ultimately nakedly exposed in some type of arena in which they must defeat or be defeated by an equivalent antagonist.⁴ The male body is emphasized in its phallic vertical pose and in the opportunity often to see the male body semi-clothed in an objectified state. These images are often contrasted with those that show the male body as the opposite—supine and horizontal, often lost in sleep, unconsciousness, or even self-absorbed bliss. The objectification of the male body, in other words, is made clear and even emphasized by the homoerotic cradling of the male body by other men⁵ (Figures 1.4 and 1.5).

Figure 1.4 Sunlamp. Dr. Strangelove. Stanley Kubrick. 1964. Columbia Pictures.

Figure 1.5 Sunlamp. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick. 1968. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

The homoerotic nature of these images is given an even more complex spin if one considers the fact that Kubrick has at times framed his male and female actors in similar poses, sometimes even identical ones. The female Vietcong sniper of Full Metal Jacket is seen lying on her back before she is symbolically gang raped at the end of the film after she has possessed the phallic power of the rifle throughout the long sniper sequence in Hue City that ends the film—echoing and doubling the psychological torture of recruit “Pyle” at the beginning of the film as he lies supine on his bunk and his ultimate murder/suicide at the end of the film’s first sequence while sitting upright in the barrack’s “Head.” Kubrick constantly oscillates between upright and supine as a way to suggest changes in power, but also in the relative feminine and masculine roles that characters inhabit at a given moment in a film. The predominate bodies that are shown are definitely male ones, though the use of the male gaze is never as simple as it may seem as we are always asked to study the body that is on display as a self-conscious gesture: placing the body in space, giving it a gender, and contemplating its reason for being thus called attention to.⁶ Compositions involving the body seem to float away from the narrative arc that is supposed to tether them and take on their own social meaning separate from the ones we might associate with the context of the screen. By the time that astronaut Dave Bowman arrives in the Louis XVI room at the end of 2001, he has been rendered vulnerable, essentially erased, ready to be remade as something new, or something other. As Arthur C. Clarke originally wrote, “he was ‘penetrated by something [that] invaded his mind’” and “he stood ‘wide-eyed, slack jawed, and wholly receptive’” (qtd. in Janes 139). This effect, I would argue, is a residue of Kubrick’s early work with still photography, where the context of the image had to be even more self-contained, even further embedded in life itself rather than a master filmmaker’s oeuvre (Figures 1.6 and 1.7).

Figure 1.6 Pyle. Full Metal Jacket. Stanley Kubrick. 1987. Warner Brothers.

Figure 1.7 Sniper. Full Metal Jacket. Stanley Kubrick. 1987. Warner Brothers.

What did change about Kubrick’s use of the still frames of the body was a general movement from the male body in “Day of the Fight” and Killer’s Kiss to the female in Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) to the male in 2001 and A Clockwork Orange (1971) and back again to the female in his final posthumous film, Eyes Wide Shut. Whatever we may think about this film’s artistic merits, which are, at best, complicated, the film foregrounds the notion of looking and seeing and represents the most sustained instance in his filmography of the meditation upon the female body. The film opens with Nicole Kidman’s body framed by two classical columns, which themselves call attention not only to the notion of seeing her body as a part of a spatial structure but also emphasize its proportions, elongation, doubling in the mirror, and framing, much like a filmed photograph. This shot is also, of course, that of a famously naked movie star, one half of a real-life Hollywood power couple and the reason that many people were interested in the film. Immediately after showing Kidman naked Kubrick cuts to the title of the film, which acts as a pun on seeing and the give-and-take aspect of the film as a whole: we get to see Kidman, but then she is taken away; we think we know what we see, but we don’t. Just as Tom Cruise, as Dr. Bill Harford, is never able truly to see his wife, so is the film, finally, about the audience’s inability to see what is in front of their eyes. Are we looking at the character Alice Harford, or at Nicole Kidman? Do we ever know her any better than Bill does? What is the film “really” telling us about marriage, fidelity, and the act of looking itself? (Figures 1.8 and 1.9).

Figure 1.8 Opening image. Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick. 1999. Warner Brothers.

Figure 1.9 Opening image detail. Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick. 1999. Warner Brothers.

This tricky surface is emphasized by the display of Kidman’s skin and the type of her body. From this point on in the film, the audience will encounter a plethora of naked, semi-naked, prone and supine female bodies, many of which will echo Kidman’s specific body-type. Kidman’s body, while the originary text for the women in the film, is herself a particular type that has shown up in other of Kubrick’s films—tall, even statuesque, with long fair hair and well-proportioned in the classical European sense of that word: long legs; ample, though not large, hips and breasts; conventional good looks.⁷ While not quite Teutonic, the shape is clearly not accidental on Kubrick’s part and Kidman’s body recalls that of the topless actress that Alex must confront in A Clockwork Orange as part of the demonstration that the Ludovico Technique has stopped not only his desire for violence but sex as well. Likewise, when Jack Torrance confronts the ghostly woman in the bathroom of room 237 in The Shining she is clearly supposed to be the same irresistible type, an ideal for the male psyche. This type, in fact, exists in Kubrick as early as his still photography.⁸ In Eyes Wide Shut the multiplication of Kidman that begins in front of the mirror will continue as she looks into a mirror in their bathroom before they go to a party at the home of a wealthy client, Ziegler (played by director Sydney Pollack), and then watches herself in a bedroom mirror as she and her husband make love upon returning home that night. In both instances, she is wearing glasses, almost as if to emphasize that she wants to see herself clearly (Figures 1.10, 1.11, and 1.12).

Figure 1.10 Model. A Clockwork Orange. Stanley Kubrick. 1971. Warner Brothers.

Figure 1.11 Woman in shower. The Shining. Stanley Kubrick. 1980. Warner Brothers.

Figure 1.12 Bill and Alice before the mirror. Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick. 1999. Warner Brothers.

At the party, where the set is decorated like a painting by Klimt, both Harfords undergo attempted seductions.⁹ Bill, in particular, is accosted by two models who walk beside him and echo the columns that frame Kidman at the beginning. Bill is then secretly taken upstairs to attend to a nearly-overdosed model and/or prostitute, Mandy (Julienne Davis), who lies semi-conscious in Ziegler’s huge bathroom. Mandy, in particular, looks like Kidman and her death later in the film is made purposefully confusing and possibly unsolvable to the audience. The next night Bill and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Topographies of Desire
• Part 2: The Pornographic Imaginary
• Part 3: The Space of Sex in Contemporary Film and Television
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint