A Different Kind of Recession
The Weekly Watch, Round 4: On the disappearance of sexuality from the movies
Hello, and welcome again! I am still messing about with the form of these posts, and this week serves as yet another experiment. Just one piece of culture on the docket, and it’s a bit less structured than a normal review. And you may have noticed the title has changed, due to a plea from my roommate to make my posts catchier (his startup-founder bona fides coming to the fore). As always, comments and critiques are appreciated.
Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987)
When did cinema become so sexless? Since the halcyon days of the 90s, when lusty thrillers like Basic Instinct and Eyes Wide Shut were mainstream, the world of film has seemed to become not merely uninterested in, but wholeheartedly averse to eroticism.
The Marvel movies that have dominated the box office charts over the last decade are certainly guilty of this. Their aversion to sexuality is cut from the same cloth as their penchant for visually flat action sequences and their insistence on sapping their shots of all vibrancy: a desire to alienate as few people as possible, and thus generate the largest crowd possible, and thus achieve the highest return on investment they can. These are not pieces of art so much as commercial objects. Of course blockbuster cinema has often made artistic concessions to acquire mass appeal, but rarely before has it been so blatant.
All of which is to say, it is unsurprising that MCU has steered so clear of anything sensual. What is more puzzling, though, is the fact that more artistically adventurous films, such as those which compete during awards season, have themselves been mostly sapped of sex. For a rather crude metric, consider the selection of Best Picture nominees over the last five Academy Award cycles. Of the 44 films that have been nominated, just two (2017’s Call Me By Your Name and 2018’s The Favourite) have anything approaching an erotic element.1 Sexuality is these days only rarely the actual subject of film, more often shading the cinematic background than appearing in the fore. Sexuality seems to exist only in the subtext, if at all.
We are, to put it lightly, very, very far from the time when Adrian Lyne’s 1987 erotic thriller Fatal Attraction was not only one of the year’s top-grossing releases (second, to be precise, with more than $156 million at the domestic box office), but also a Best Picture nominee. It was a veritable phenomenon, eliciting a polarizing response from audiences who were often horrified or disgusted by the film, but nonetheless completely captivated. From a contemporaneous LA Times article:
In California theaters, audiences have been known to erupt with spontaneous hisses, boos and cheers in reaction to gruesome scenes or the villain’s behavior or in support of the film’s heroine.
Lyne’s fourth feature centers on Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas), a hotshot New York City lawyer with the stereotypical perfect family life: a loving, caring wife (Anne Archer) and a sweet daughter (Ellen Latzen) awaiting him at home. The American Dream, folks! Nevertheless, when his wife and daughter depart for the weekend, he cannot help but succumb to temptation and launch into a steamy affair with Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), an editor at a publishing company.
The problems begin when the sex ends and the consequences of the sex become clear. Their expectations for their arrangement could not be further apart: Dan thinks that this is a meaningless fling which ends as soon as he goes home, while Alex believes it to be the beginning of something serious. Unfortunately for both of them, this clash of expectations is the last straw for Alex, whose delusions morph into full-on psychosis and stalking. Incessant phone calls to Dan’s home and unsolicited visits to his office are but the first signs that things have gone awry, and comparatively benign when considered against the violence and manipulation that follows.
Fatal Attraction taken on its own terms is something of a mixed bag. On the level of pure craft, it is unimpeachable. Peter E. Berger and Michael Kahn‘s editing is slick and unnerving, featuring whiplash-inducing cuts between Alex and her bewildered, terrified prey that elevate the tension unbearably. Douglas could not be more perfectly cast, the very personification of a slimeball whose externally confident facade masks a fundamental insecurity, a feeling that he is an impostor in the life he has somehow built for himself. His brilliant performance, however, is overshadowed completely by Close’s career-defining role. In Close’s hands, Alex’s humanity is unmistakeable; she becomes less an inhuman psychopath than a real person whose slew of bad romantic experiences and unfulfilled longing finally become too much to bear.
It is on the level of plot that Fatal Attraction’s flaws become more pronounced. Particularly troubling is the fact that the film never lingers on the rather pressing question of Dan’s culpability; it effectively exonerates him of wrongdoing by making the other half of his affair immediately devolve into madness. Indeed, in the hands of a less skilled actress, Alex could have become a compete one-dimensional caricature, bereft of depth and motivated only by her psychopathy. The script does not characterize her at all; Alex’s inner life is entirely subtext, personified only by the desperation and panic laced into Close’s physicality and the tone of her line readings.
Lyne’s film is perhaps most fascinating when viewed as a relic of its time. In spite of its luridness, its thematic valence is quite traditional: the antagonist is a single, career-driven woman while the only truly innocent figure is the homemaking housewife. This was a time, after all, when America was torn between the conflicting attitudes of two generations: the sexual revolutions of the late Gen Xers squaring off with the more prudish family values of Boomers. Sex was no longer so taboo as to be undiscussed, but unalloyed promiscuity remained something to be frowned upon. It could be depicted, but not condoned. If it was condoned, it could only be heavily suggestive rather than explicit, as in this clip from 1988’s Working Girl (another film comfortable with sexuality that received critical acclaim and commercial success):
Inductive reasoning would hold that in the interim, we would have become ever more comfortable with sex on screen, with the last vestiges of the social taboos dissipating and the sexual revolution taking full force. So why has mainstream cinema regressed to the same vague prudishness that prevailed decades ago? One factor is, as with most things, the internet: specifically, the ease with which pornography is now accessible, and the consequent demystification of sex such that it no longer possesses the same allure it once commanded. Perhaps people just don’t care about sex anymore; teenagers are after all having less sex than ever before, contrary to what watching Euphoria would indicate. Speaking of which, perhaps on-screen sexuality has migrated entirely to the small screen; think about both the highbrow, prestige shows focused almost entirely on sex (Masters of Sex and The Girlfriend Experience in addition to the aforementioned Euphoria) and the long-running workplace dramas that double as racy soaps (Grey’s Anatomy).
Whatever it may be, the old idiom that “sex sells” is no longer the case, at least in terms of movie tickets. And that’s a shame: along with violence, sex is one of the few truly visceral elements of life, something that can supersede logic and reason and even emotion. It is uniquely exciting, and cinema becomes less rich and textured in its absence.
There’s possibly an argument for The Power of the Dog (2021) as well, but it is more of a red herring than an actual theme or focus.
More guns! Less sex! Ain't Hollywood great.