But the act of darkness has also mostly been submerged in metaphor, displacement and synecdoche.
n fact, sex in the movies is often the perfect definition of synecdoche — that is, when a part is made to stand for the whole. In the days of stricter censorship, a kiss stood for the full sexual monty, and that in turn stood in for love or the development of a relationship. When Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman engage in their long, luxuriant, languorous smooch in Notorious (1946), it doesn’t just mean that they have each conceived a massive sexual passion for the other, though that is there too — it means they are falling in love.
Sex, in turn, is usually part of the whole range of effects a movie brings to bear on the viewer. Is there a single Hollywood film made today that doesn’t have a “love interest”? Note they don’t call it a sex interest, even if they are really thinking about whether the lead actress will bare her breasts if paid enough.
Careers were built on sex, and still are — from Marilyn Monroe to Brigitte Bardot to Brad Pitt, whose elevation to the status of outstanding male sexual icon of our time was launched by one sex scene, a few minutes in Thelma and Louise.
Sex and sex appeal are at the heart of how movies are conceived. Look at a movie like Pearl Harbor, which set out deliberately to be as big a blockbuster as possible. It’s hard to avoid the sense that its makers were not as aware of the potential appeal to gay audiences of Josh Hartnett in a tight white T-shirt as they were conscious of how much Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale’s turgid romance might appeal to straight members of the audience.
Yet movies that tackle sex directly as a subject, that delve into the mysteries of eroticism without using it as a vehicle to demonstrate something else, are more rare. By the Sixties, the awareness had dawned that sex and love were not necessarily the same thing, though they shadowed each other. The rise of the mainstream cinema’s sister industry, filmed pornography, must have helped. Yet pornography showed sex in a vacuum, as it were, sex stripped of personal foible and social context, which goaded intelligent filmmakers to ask how we could talk about sex without the camouflage of romance. And, increasingly, the challenge to a visual medium was to push the boundaries of what could actually be shown.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) was the great shocker that began to tackle some of the taboos. That hulking icon of the American cinema, Marlon Brando, as compelling in his decline as he was in his ascendancy, is a bereaved American in Paris, conducting an anonymous sexual affair with a French woman. This was hot buttered sex, not glossy romance. The sex here may have been a form of grief, or of self-discovery, but it wasn’t a stand-in for love. Or was it?
Then sex, as the great repressed of Western culture, came to stand for liberation itself, though that liberation was — and continues to be — frequently ambiguous. In Walderian Borowczyk’s delirious surreal fantasy The Beast (1975), sex seems to well up from the unconscious as a huge, anarchic force. The example of Japan neatly counterpoints the Western perspective: for Nagisa Oshima, in the explicit Ai No Corrida (1976), eroticism could be figured as an escape from militarism.
Sexual obsession seemed an essential quality of the artist in Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963); in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1995), creative artistry and fetishism are inextricable. For underground filmmakers such as Bruce LaBruce, sex could only be viewed through the prism of pornography. Recent movies such as Romance and the forthcoming Intimacy take us back to Last Tango in Paris, exploring the relationship between sex and alienation.
We are still working out, I think, what sex means in our culture, and how it relates to other areas. But at least we can start being more honest and open about it, and start showing it for what it is. Nowadays, a kiss is just a kiss.