Hollywood still can’t get sex right.
The September issue of the Atlantic features a lengthy article on newly #MeToo-ish Hollywood suddenly hiring “intimacy coordinators” and formalizing other protections so that semiexplicit sex scenes will avoid on-set abuses or misunderstandings. It’s all rather cringe inducing, so this column will spare you the details. Suffice it to say that if Hollywood is to show so much nudity and simulated sex, it makes sense to take at least a few precautions for any remaining semblance of the actor’s decency and dignities.
Hollywood is missing the better idea, though. It’s a simple idea, and an obvious one. Rather than providing the actors with “silicone guards” and other prophylactics, and rather than hiring specialists for “intimacy direction and choreography services,” directors should just stop showing so much nudity and simulated sex.
Gee, what a notion: Let the audience use its imagination. Depict attraction and “heat” on screen, but let actual sex retain its mystery. Oh, what horrors might await if the poor audience is deprived the vision of bare breasts and thrusting torsos!
Atlantic writer Kate Julian posits the notion that because “depictions of sex on-screen have a powerful ability to shape our attitudes toward intimacy,” it therefore follows that “the severing of sex from art would impoverish both.” This is tommyrot. Hollywood thrived for half a century without requiring actors to disrobe and perform fake coitus.
When couples kissed passionately and then disappeared behind closed doors, only to emerge the next morning with blissful smiles on their faces, audiences got the message and the storylines suffered not one bit.
Indeed, because of the lack of what modern lingo calls “adult” features in old movies, the stories and themes themselves were actually more adult in the older sense of the word. It is arrested adolescence that feels unsatisfied without explicit arousal; it is the adult who can appreciate the subtle gesture and the knowing smile.
Instead of obsessing about “finding a way to make sex safe for the … screen, and the … screen safe for sex,” why not make the whole viewing experience safe from tawdriness?
In the long run, Hollywood might find that even if sex sells, it sells less well than real romance.
