Turn Me On, Damn It: What Happened to Sexy Cinema?
Comment - Hanna C. Nes
Summer is here, baby, with its stretch of never-ending sunlight and pulsating heat. Such a season demands fitting films, ones that languish in the excesses of the body, as temperatures and tensions hit a boiling point. Despite promising a horny and seductive energy to eager movie-going masses, it feels like recent releases have been unable to capture true sensuality and eroticism on film. Has our idea of brazen sexuality become incongruous with what we’ve been promised at the cinema, that we’re being teased without the titillation?
I was practically shaking in my seat at the cinema when I sat down with a friend to finally watch Challengers. Luca Guadagnino’s new film had dominated my Instagram feed, as friends raved in their Letterboxd reviews about the Zendaya vehicle, and TikTok was replete with rat boy summer memes and churro analyses. Just over two hours later, we left feeling somewhat deflated, disappointed and most importantly, not at all turned on.
When Emerald Fennell’s much-talked-about Saltburn hit theatres at the end of 2023, the majority of the hubbub was about the scandalous shock factor moments of the movie. Bathtub water ejaculate slurping, period blood licking, grave humping imagery and discussion abounded, designating the Barry Keoghan - Jacob Elordi boasting project as the provocative sexy film of the season. At a screening in Montreal, the younger girls behind me couldn't contain their giggling and gasps. I, on the other hand, expected more. More graphicness, more liquid, more texture, more sound. Hell, I wanted to see the bathtub cum!
I hoped Love Lies Bleeding would change the case for my streak of disappointment, but instead, it confirmed it. A sapphic thriller, I had recently watched the Wachowski sisters’ iconic 1996 Bound, which tells the story of a mafioso’s girlfriend and ex-con who plan to run away with the boyfriend’s money. It was so steamy that upon finishing the film I wished I still had a menthol cigarette somewhere in the apartment. I prayed Love Lies Bleeding would hit a similar note, as both films revolved around women trying to escape from familial ties to criminality in search of a better life. That was pretty much it when it came to treading common ground, despite thinking the more recent release would also have me reaching for a nicotine hit. But alas!
Oh why, oh why, couldn’t any of the recent releases make me break a sweat? Was I the problem? Or have we stumbled upon a conception of movie marketing that willfully misleads audiences and capitalizes on diluted and palatable sensationalism?
L-R: La Piscine (Rialto Pictures), I Am Love (First Sun), Call Me By Your Name (Frenesy Film Company).
I decided to take a look back at the promotional materials for each film, trying to pinpoint how I felt my expectations were guided by what was promised or at least emphasized. Maybe my disappointment was the product of mis-placed hormones, the bite being more delicious than the whole damn meal.
When MGM Amazon Studios uploaded the main trailer for Saltburn, the snippet was ripe with seductive danger and the joys of rich people behaving badly. Presenting us with a whirlwind of neon-soaked imagery, it almost seemed aimed towards the Euphoria crowd, notably having difficulties reconciling the film’s dark deadpan humour with the erotic peril plotline it was pushing. The world’s introduction to Challengers was a hotly anticipated image released in 2023 of male leads Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor each kissing Zendaya’s neck while sitting on a bed (you know the one). The internet lost its goddamn mind, ménage à trois memes bombarding social media. The scene was also the focus of the main trailer, soundtracked to a throbbing remix of Rihanna’s “S&M”, despite there being no sadomasochism (sorry but Zendaya shaking her bob wig around and being mean doesn’t count), let alone visible sex scene, in the film. The final trailer, released earlier this spring, beckoned us to experience what the deeply voiced narrator touted the movie as “one of the sexiest films ever made.” Huh?! The sexiest thing about Challengers was the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross soundtrack, but what else do you expect from the frontman of Nine Inch Nails who once sung that he wanted “to fuck you like an animal”?
As I was writing this, I saw YouTuber Broey Deschanel post a piece she wrote for DAZED on the crazed fan culture for Challengers and Saltburn. I found myself vigorously nodding along to her criticism. “Challengers has sold itself as a sexy joyride with a whiff of danger,” she states. “The movie itself, however, is less torrid than it is teasing, more erotic thriller than full-on erotic. Yet, even still, audiences have taken to social media to proclaim their horniness. You could argue the same for Saltburn. Its shock-factor sexual content […] is decidedly unsexy. The movie is never full on with its eroticism, but still elicited mania. How?”
Love Lies Bleeding, the sole A24 production on this list (I feel like at this point I’m in a love/hate relationship with the company that is only going south from here), introduced itself to audiences with a Bronski Beat, gun-cocking, lycra-clad trailer. A24 promoted the film on Instagram with a clip of Kristen Stewart’s shy Lou admiring Katy O’Brien’s wannabe bodybuilder Jackie as she lifts weights at the former’s gym. The clip, captioned with “love at first sweat,” revels in the unabashedly lustful queer gaze between the women, underlying this tension with Nona Hendryx’s 80s synth tune “Transformation”. To be honest, this was the clip that confirmed my need to see Rose Glass’ film, but it’s one of very few moments of pure eroticism. Unlike Love Lies Bleeding, every interaction between Bound’s Corky and Violet is soaked with their lust for one another, whether it be the former’s pouty lips twitching or the latter’s breathy sex kitten voice. Even when walls separate them, their overwhelming tension and animalistic need for the other permeates beyond physical co-presence. Lee Wallace writes in “Continuous Sex: The Editing of Homosexuality in Bound and Rope,” that Bound “is everywhere structured by its attempts to visualize lesbianism, to make it succumb, once and for all, to the order of the visible” (Wallace, 369). Love Lies Bleeding promised that in its promotion, pitting blood, sweat, steroids and other fluids as the fuel for the fire between Jackie and Lou. But in reality, the two characters are at odds with one another for a lot more of the film than audiences are led to believe. Despite their relationship being so heavily emphasized in the trailer and isolated promotional clips, the film is truly a family drama…which is not exactly sexy.
Diving deeper into desire
Film and sex have always had a fraught relationship (understatement of the century ha!). In Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, editor Eric Schaefer writes that in Hollywood, “as the Production Code lost its teeth, it was periodically amended to loosen restrictions on some subjects” (Schaefer, 5). The non-hometown front proved a fruitful source of more scant material, as “some theaters turned to ‘art cinema,’ movies that usually had a foreign pedigree, more adult subject matter, and glimpses of nudity, for example, . . . And God Created Woman (1956) and Les Amants (1958, The Lovers)” (Schaefer, 5). Another result of progressing social mores meant that “movies no longer had a big love scene; they now had a sex scene” (Schaefer, 8) where cutaways and metaphors were replaced by simulated encounters and strategically placed items or angles to obscure the visual confirmation of coitus. Now, I’m not arguing that everything needs to be shown right in the open (insert the “show me to me please, Rachel!” meme here), we have multiple senses to appeal to, folks! Linda William’s piece on Jane Fonda’s onscreen orgasms through the 1960s and 1970s mentions “when the kind of affective control offered by musical interlude was not deployed, then a new kind of nakedness became available to films, even when the characters having sex were clothed” (Linda Williams, 66). “The smooch of a kiss, the smack of a slap, the slurp of fellatio or cunnilingus, the whoosh of penetration— not to mention the sighs, moans or outright cries generated by sexual connection—,” she argues, “make the sex that is seen seem all the more proximate to the viewer-listener” (Linda Williams, 66).
In her article on Guadagnino’s desire trilogy (made up of I Am Love, A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name), Joanna Di Mattia writes that “Desire is a wish; a risk; a hunger. Desire starts with an arousal that then becomes a yearning. It alters our perception and changes our molecules. To follow where desire leads can make life better or messier, propelling us towards new versions of ourselves. It can liberate or destroy us. Desire dares us to yield to it and then threatens to consume us in its obsessive waves.” I realized that her discussion of desire is exactly what each of the guilty parties has been exploiting in promotional material. Each positions desire as a source of longing, power struggle and potential threat and danger, but the film itself never delivers on this promise. Challengers, Saltburn and Love Lies Bleeding self-sensationalize and isolate their most seemingly sexual and lustful moments in a way that drains them of any meaning or significance, instead simply becoming visual fodder. In his essay “Critics and the Sex Scene,” Raymond J. Haberski recalls Playboy magazine’s series “The History of Sex in the Cinema” which spanned from 1965 to 1969. “Playboy’s exposure of cinematic sex helped to hasten the transition in movie culture from a world of censorship to an era of relative sexual freedom by illustrating how often sex was part of mainstream, as well as underground, cinema. But by cataloguing stills, and offering relatively little real criticism of the films themselves, the magazine also continued its tradition of divorcing sex from any genuine thought. After all, the point was to titillate not provoke” (Raymond J. Haberski, 383). Challenger’s threesome teasing promo confirmed that - nothing of the sort happened in the film, yet it got tongues a-wagging.
Like the old curmudgeon I am inside, I miss the more evident and honest eroticism of older films. I recently re-watched Jacques Deray’s erotic thriller La Piscine at Cinemateket. The thriller allows the viewer to gaze at Alain Delon’s sweaty, bronzed body, as he lounges by the aforementioned pool and gently whips his lover Marianne with a branch before a jealousy induced murder shakes their relationship. This emphasis on the visual spectacle of his body allows the viewer to understand both the lustful erotic energy it holds, as well as the potential for violence and destruction. Guadagnino’s remake A Bigger Splash, starring Tilda Swinton, creates between the couple “a language dominated by touch and desire, which through highlighting the intersections between clothing and the body heighten the spectator’s erotic and sensorial responses to the film,” as Sarah Gilligan argues in her essay “Sun, Sex, and Style in Smart Cinema” (Gilligan, 672). The smash-hit Call Me By Your Name is similar, although perhaps there is some truth to the criticism Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover mention “that it participates in a tourist logic, one in which Italy primarily functions to provide an escapist backdrop for fantasies of sexual longing and conquest.” (Galt and Schoonover, 67). But I think its lack of a visible sex scene accentuates the lustful longing between Elio and Oliver, as Di Mattia argues that “the interplay of objects and physical space, as well as an emphasis on the space between actor’s bodies, captures the urgency of the erotic experienc,” as Guadagnino’s strength lies in “crafting images we imagine we can taste, touch, and smell. His is a mise-en-scène pregnant with sensory and sensual pleasures.” Even in the far more explicit I Am Love, Tilda Swinton’s sexual re-awakening occurs “in a landscape so overwhelmingly sensual and tactile, [that] Guadagnino doesn’t distinguish between one quivering form and another.” All that to say, I think Luca needs his mojo back.
Returning to Challengers, Deschanel mused that it could be that “the film doesn’t need sex scenes because every formal element is there to maximise our pleasure. It’s sensory overload.” Maybe that’s it. Perhaps I’m operating on an already outdated perception of eroticism, lust, sexiness and desire. It could be that a queerbait-y threesome allusion and the grunting of slightly unconventionally attractive (oh sorry…ratty) boys as they whack tennis balls soundtracked to a primed-for-TikTok-and-Spotify-playlists track is what feeds our appetite now.