I miss horny movies.
There has been a recent dialogue about the lack of sex in mainstream US movies. Paul Verhoeven, one of the living masters of excess, talked about this while promoting his new movie Benedetta. I guess it is one of those things that one just doesn’t notice until it is pointed out, but after that it becomes impossible to ignore. So here is a question for you:
What was the last movie that you saw in a multiscreen movie theater in which there was nudity or sex, but it was not used for comedic value?
The answer came to me after about twenty minutes of thinking about this. I saw The Lighthouse (2019) in the theater, and that movie is extremely horny. There is a lot of sexual activity and some graphic nudity. Good movie. But before The Lighthouse, what was the last one? I’ll let you know when I think of it.
Part of the disneyfication/corporatization of modern US moviemaking is that wide-release movies are all bloodless and sexless because they are marketed to every demographic and the characters need to sell apps and toys and streaming subscriptions. Sex has been relegated almost entirely to comedies, and even then, it is not sexy sex, and on top of that, there aren’t even really comedies in wide release any more that aren’t PG-13. Outside of comedies, everything is a stupid franchise installment that has been market-tested and tailored to be acceptable in every world market and for every age group, so it has a couple of tame jokes, the occasional lady in a slinky dress, a hairless male torso, and some mopey action sequences.
Horny movies just don’t get wide releases any more. It is a massive bummer. I miss seeing Diane Lane and Richard Gere and Michael effing Douglas and Sharon Stone. Who is the current equivalent of these stars? I miss R ratings. I miss sweaty movies like Wild Things (1998) and Happy Together (1997). And I miss when a movie like Interview with the Vampire (1994) could get a big budget, massive movie stars, a wide release, and still be a horny, homoerotic melodrama.
Interview with the Vampire is so great, y’all. It isn’t a good movie, but it’s great. There are a bunch of horny but sad vampires in New Orleans, and later they travel to Paris, and then to LA, and they meet up with other horny but sad vampires, and everything is gauzy and shot in warm lighting. And everyone blasts each other with horny but sad eyes. There is lots of blood. There is a very tragic mistake made in creating a child vampire. There is a framing story involving Christian Slater as the titular interviewer. IT’S SO FUN.
I think that Twilight and True Blood stole the thunder that Anne Rice first called down. It’s a little bit of a bummer, although I wish to be clear that I’m not demeaning those stories. You do you. Anne Rice didn’t have a monopoly on vampires, but she did a lot of work in divorcing the vampire of its roots in colonizer anxieties and religious superstitions, and she took the idea that the vampire’s bite was a sexual act and sold millions upon millions of books about it. I read a ton of Anne Rice in junior high and especially in high school. Memnoch the Devil and The Tale of the Body Thief were my jam for a while.
Most major movie studios being owned by a couple of megacorporations is more actively harmful for getting variety in movies than the dumb Hays Code was, and look at how the Hays Code era completely warped the brains of baby boomers. At least with the Code era, filmmakers could suggest and imply, and could use coded images and language. Now the subtext and the cleverness are just excised entirely.
Moonlight (2016) and Shame (2011) and other prestige movies do get more freedom, but at the cost of being relegated to a tiny number of screens, and only then seemingly begrudgingly. I imagine that the rise of subscription cable services also staked out some of this territory (e.g., the AV Club’s long-running joke about HBO having a CEO of Tits), but even then, there are apparent limits. But it seems fallacious to suggest that people lack the appetite to watch both Euphoria on HBO and a sexy sex movie in the theater. Whether it is ‘splosions, nudity, or a good joke, the communal experience of a movie theater will always be richer than watching Netflix on an iPhone.
At any rate, I’m excited to see Benedetta (2021) should it come to theaters in Pittsburgh. It won’t release on one-twentieth of the screens that Basic Instinct did, but at least the 82-year-old Dutchman is still making movies for grownups that have some cultural footprint in the United States.
Oher 1994 candidates: Léon: The Professional; Pulp Fiction; Shawshank Redemption; True Lies; The Mask; Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; Dumb and Dumber
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.