Last week actor Penn Badgley opened a Pandora’s Box of sex-negative film discourse, undoubtedly linked to a wider resurgence of moral puritanism. His comments, mostly relegated to personal musings on performed intimacy and fidelity, are hardly as concerning as the subsequent eruption of the inevitable twitter-based ‘discussion’ on the place of sex in film.
The recurring assertion that sex scenes in cinema are ‘unnecessary’ has left a lingering bad taste. Such a utilitarian view of film as an artistic medium is disconcerting to see. Advancements in the technology of filmmaking, coexisting with an active effort to increase the diversity of human expressions, voices and experiences realised in film, should lead to an increased range of sexual experiences depicted on screen. Sex – how it relates to human experience and how different this experience can be to a wide array of people – presents filmmakers with vast artistic potential, of which cinema has barely scratched the surface. These online sentiments have even gone so far as to advocate the reinstating of Hays Code-esque guidelines which would restrict cinematic representations of intimacy. This is disappointing, to say the least, and is reflective of an incredibly narrow, Hollywood-centric view of cinema.
The limited scope of artistic expression seen from mainstream Hollywood, particularly in regard to sex on screen, feeds into this narrative. The relatively rare instances of sex in Hollywood cinema seem to exist as a simultaneously gratuitous yet sanitised, uncanny representation which doesn’t particularly speak of human nature. I would argue that it is in projects that particularly reflect the vision of singular filmmakers, where one truly sees ways in which sex on screen can act as meaningful visual shorthand to thoughtfully convey a range of perspectives, emotions and relationships.
In Love (2015), Gaspar Noé employs sex scenes as a primary medium to demonstrate how the film’s protagonist, Murphy, uses sex through memory as a cocoon from his current, unfulfilling relationship. He juxtaposes different forms of sexual encounters and language to convey the ways in which people’s relationship with intimacy is fraught with hypocrisy and contradiction. Specifically, the threesome scene in Love demonstrates how film, as an artistic medium, can portray sex in an aesthetically intriguing way while also exploring the aforementioned themes. In Happy Together (1997), Wong Kar-Wai utilises sex to portray the physical intimacy of two men, Lai and Ho, who struggle to replicate this on an emotional level. In Ladybird (2017), Greta Gerwig uses the sex scene to portray an honest, awkward and even funny coming-of-age moment which perfectly reflects the protagonist, Christine, coming to terms with the disparity between her own fantasies and expectations and the reality of immature, potentially disappointing sexual encounters.
To dismiss the role sex can play in cinematic storytelling dismisses the way in which sex is, for many, an intrinsic part of adult life. This proposes an incredibly limited view of film, which only serves to harm the way people engage with it as an art form.
Image Credit: “Penn Badgley” by gdcgraphics is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.