SEX IN THE CINEMA PART 2
Charlize Theron, Daniel Craig, Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger+
Like an aging actress, sometime between the 90s and the aughts, the cinema began to lose some of its sex appeal. But unlike actresses who develop crows’ feet, get thick around the middle and segue from playing the ingénue to someone’s mother, the movies were coming to terms with an evolving distribution landscape. The home entertainment revolution that began in the 80s with the advent of videocassettes, reached its crescendo in 2005 when US DVD sales topped $16.4 billion. People’s relationships with the movies began to change: if you were a fan of prurient content you could rent or buy it and then, with a press of the remote, enjoy it in the privacy of your living room. Audiences became more selective, and the movies that were able to motivate people to get off their couches and into theatres began to change. At the same time, the average per picture box office gross started to decline. Since the turn of the new century, average box office grosses have dropped nearly 37%.
Hollywood was still cranking out movies with lots of sex, although an increasing percentage of them tended to have sophomoric or violent themes. There was a wave of adolescent sex comedies like American Pie 2, Road Trip, 100 Girls and American Wedding, but there were also exceedingly violent films like American Psycho starring Christian Bale as a successful investment banker with a psychopathic alter ego. Although the film’s violence is graphic and disturbing (he kills his business associate by hitting him over the head with an ax), it was the notorious threesome scene that had to be edited down to avoid a dreaded NC-17 rating.
Monster starring Charlize Theron in her Oscar-winning role, told the true story of a truck-stop prostitute whose budding lesbian relationship coincided with her becoming a serial killer.
Despite being classified as horror movies, films like 2000’s Scary Movie, 2001’s Jason X and 2003’s Freddy vs Jason gave audiences more than their fair share of bouncing breasts as young women tried to escape marauding, blood-thirsty villains.
In between guffaws and gore, the studios produced some provocative yet cerebral films. Movies like Quills, starring Oscar-nominee Geoffrey Rush as the imprisoned Marquis De Sade, and director Darren Aronofsky’s disturbing Requiem for a Dream, which featured what has become to be known as the ‘Ass to Ass’ sequence that earned the film a NC-17 rating. Artisan, the studio behind the movie, appealed the rating (the equivalent of a box office death knell), but lost and wound up releasing the film without a rating. A subsequent home entertainment release was edited down in order to garner a Blockbuster-friendly R-rating.
Sexual experimentation of all kinds, including lesbianism and homosexuality, became popular themes in the 21st century. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive starring Naomi Watts as a young actress who suffers amnesia after surviving a brutal car crash on Los Angeles’ hilltop road, featured some heavy girl-on-girl action between Watts and co-star Elena Harring, who happened to be the first Latina to win the Miss USA title.
While Kissing Jessica Stein only included heavy petting and kissing, it told the story of a straight woman who, after a series of disastrous relationships, samples some forbidden fruit. In 2002, director Todd Haynes gave us the atmospheric Far from Heaven starring Julianne Moore as an Eisenhower-era wife who catches her husband (Dennis Quaid), kissing another man. Thirteen years later, Haynes showed us the flipside of that story in Carol. Like Heaven, Carol was also set in the repressive 1950s and tells the scandalous story of a young woman (Rooney Mara) who meets and becomes infatuated with an older, married woman (Cate Blanchett).
In a performance Roger Ebert called “An astonishment”, Colin Farrell starred in 2004’s A Home at the End of the World, which took us inside a love triangle between an emotionally damaged young man who had a hard time feeling anything, an older woman (Robin Wright) and his gay boyhood friend (Dallas Roberts). The film’s underlying theme that sex changes everything is also explored in Y Tu Mama Tambien, with Gael Garcia Bernal as a Mexican teenager who, along with a friend and an older woman, hit the road and learn some hard lessons about friendship, sex and each other.
Set against the windswept Big Horn mountains of eastern Wyoming, Brokeback Mountain was perhaps the most important gay film of the decade. The story of forbidden love between two closeted cowboys, the movie explored themes of longing, shame and regret. Nominated for 8 Academy-Awards, it wound up winning 3, including best director for Ang Lee. Based on a short story by Annie Proulx, the film starred Heath Ledger. and Jake Gyllenhaal as the star-crossed herdsmen, and Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway as their wives.
A triptych of LGBT-themed films about real life characters included Kinsey starring Liam Neeson as pioneering sexologist, Alfred Kinsey whose book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male broke ground by applying science to sexual behavior. Nicole Kidman took home the Best Actress Oscar for her turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, co-starring Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore, and Sean Penn received his second Academy Award for his performance in Milk, the biopic about California’s first openly gay elected official, Harvey Milk.
The decade saw a number of big-name stars take on controversial subjects and, in some cases, bare more than their souls on screen. Although far from arousing, a naked Viggo Mortenson showed us all he had to give in the bloody sauna fight scene in 2007’s Eastern Promises. The sequence, which Roger Ebert predicted would be considered “a benchmark”, set a new standard for on-screen hand-to-hand battles.
In a complete reversal of franchise norms, after 21 movies, Casino Royale set the legendary Bond girls aside in order to exploit the sexuality of the newest 007, Daniel Craig, who set tongues wagging in the infamous torture scene where he is strapped naked to an open-bottomed chair and tormented by a villain who swings a knotted rope at his testicles.
Doing laundry was never quite as dirty as is it was in Little Children when Kate Winslet, no stranger to on-screen nudity, is put through the ringer by Patrick Wilson. The story of a lovelorn housewife who connects with a married man during one long, hot summer, the film not only earned Winslet an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, she won the Best Depiction of Nudity or Sexuality Award from the Alliance for Women Film Journalists.
Pulling story ideas from the Zeitgeist, the 10’s gave us insight into how Gen X was approaching sexuality. Friends with Benefits starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake and No Strings Attached with Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman were virtually the same film, both built on the premise that two friends can enjoy sex together without developing emotional attachments. But could they really? Sex Tape starred Cameron Diaz and Jason Segal as a couple looking to add some pizazz to their sex life by filming themselves having sex in every position featured in The Joy of Sex. The only problem is the app they used to make the video sends it out to all of their friends and family. While the storyline may seem farfetched, who among us has not accidentally hit ‘reply all’?
In 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, director Martin Scorsese showed us the greed and debauchery that was synonymous with high finance in the early 90s. Based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, the film took us in to the sex, cocaine and alcohol-fueled world of a penny stock-broker who made millions before losing it all. Leonardo DiCaprio headlined an all-star cast that included Jonah Hill, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler and a then 23-year-old Margot Robbie as Belfort’s sexually manipulating wife. With orgies on airplanes, in Vegas hotel suites, at office parties and on yachts, this fantastic film has more than its share of sex, including a hot encounter on a bed full of cold, hard cash.
There have been lots of successful motion picture trilogies, but none as steamy as those based on E.L. James’ novel, Fifty Shades of Grey. The book, which sold 100 million copies, had a built-in audience so by the time the film opened on Valentine’s Day 2015, it has already broken two records: the widest R-rated opening ever and the most advanced ticket sales for an R-rated film. The film spawned two sequels, 2017’s Fifty Shades Darker and 2018’s Fifty Shades Freed. Together, the three films have grossed more than $1.3 billion worldwide.
With numbers like that, one would expect to see more movie franchises like Fifty Shades of Grey. Magic Mike tried. Like the Fifty Shades trilogy, Mike played into the fantasies of older females to become a boner fide hit, but in Mike’s case, gay men were a significant secondary audience. Unfortunately, unlike Mr. Grey’s sequel, Mike’s was lackluster and didn’t deliver the goods that audiences were clamoring for. Matthew McConaughey showed more skin in 2012’s The Paperboy, which also featured an unabashed Nicole Kidman diddling herself and urinating on Zac Efron.
No overview of sex in the cinema would be complete without Sex in the City. With a built-in audience of fans from the successful HBO series, women and gay men showed up in droves when the film opened on Memorial Day weekend in 2008. Reprising their TV roles, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis made the film a hit that grossed over $152 million at the domestic box office. But like so many successful films, the 2010 sequel Sex in the City 2 was laughable and went so far to cater to its sizeable gay audience that it featured Liza Minnelli performing Beyonce’s All the Single Ladies at the same-sex wedding of Carrie Bradhshaw’s best gay friend, Stanford.
So, what is the future of sex in the cinema? According to Kevin Goetz, president of Screen Engine/ASI, one of the motion picture industry’s leading research firms, “Today, the most important thing to get people to go out to a theatre is a big idea that motivates a big audience. Films like Last Tango in Paris and Midnight Cowboy while steeped in integrity and quality, are not big ideas for big audiences. If you’re dealing with a mass audience property, you’ve got to have a really digestible, sexy concept, not necessarily a sexy movie.”
Goetz predicts that “Movies are only going to get less sexy as a driver of attendance and more big-bet carnival rides with big ideas will rule at the box office.” His advice to Hollywood filmmakers? “Make a movie for ‘everybody’, make a movie for ‘somebody’, but don’t make a movie for ‘nobody’.”
