JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

The titillating poster for Wayne Wang's The Center of the World (2001).

The offending scene ....

... in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998)...

... absent black boxes.

Simulated sex in ...

The real (oral) sex ...

... insert sequence ....

... in Intimacy (2001).

That the studios and major independents seem to be softening their product lines to suit the family values crowd is no real surprise. The religious right emerged at the end of the 20th Century as not only a political force but a pain in the neck on the public relations front for studio Hollywood.  First Amendment advocates are far less likely than evangelicals to publicly threaten studios with boycotts when film content doesn’t suit them and it’s hard to imagine anyone rallying to oppose cuts in Rollerball.[11][open endnotes in new window]

As the studios moved into tamer territory and the R-rating became at once easier to get and riskier at the box office, X, NC-17 and Unrated films have become almost exclusively the sort of product released by the smaller independents. Indeed, though the studios have moved over the past decade or so to assimilate some of the lower budget/lower return independent market (through Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight, Disney’s Miramax etc.), they have steered clear of NC-17, X and Unrated material. Take Todd Solondz's 1998 drama Happiness, for example. First slated to be an October Films release, corporate parent Universal (owned at the time by Seagram) balked at releasing an NC-17 film. In the eleventh hour, the film was returned to its production company Good Machine. In limited play, thanks to the NC-17 rating and the absence of studio money behind it, Happiness took in just under $3 million at the box office, a few hundred thousand less than it cost to produce. The original cut of Solondz’s follow-up, Storytelling (2001), received an NC-17 from the MPAA thanks to a long, full figure inter-racial sex scene in which a white female creative writing student, bullied into a sex act with her African American professor, is urged into shouting a racist phrase as a turn-on for her aggressor. Unwilling or unable to reshoot, Solondz opted to digitally shroud the scene to obtain an R-rating. When the movie screened in theaters and then aired on premium cable channels, the print sported a huge red rectangle obscuring the bodies in the frame. The racist comments, though, remain audible throughout

Sometimes films, like Wayne Wang's The Center of the World, also released in 2001, can not be cut to accommodate an R-rating. The film is about a dot.com millionaire who pays a stripper to accompany him to Las Vegas. The deal they strike is something we must accept as viewers: no penetration, no kissing on the mouth, and a strict time limit. Like the British import Intimacy, The Center of the World alludes to Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1973). It's about sex in the absence of emotional connection, the fantasy “zipless fuck” extolled by Erica Jong in her freewheeling, sexually explicit 1973 novel Fear of Flying.[12]

There's no real sex in The Center of the World. And despite gestures towards realism (the hand-held, documentary-style digital video), it is in the end just another sexy U.S. movie melodrama about a rich businessman who buys a woman, falls in love with her, and then has to figure out a way to live without her: Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990) with a down ending. The Center of the World was released without an MPAA rating. It would have gotten an NC-17 for sure, because the simulated sex takes up so much screen time and the film’s premise (that kissing on the mouth and intercourse are out) introduced the sort of “unconventional acts” that always seem to trouble the raters at CARA.

Promoting an Unrated film is difficult. Artisan, which distributed The Center of the World, struggled to get the film booked. Many newspapers refuse to take ads for films without an MPAA rating and advertising on TV for Unrated titles is impossible. Artisan did what it could with The Center of the World by turning to the web. The terrific, very suggestive web-site for The Center of the World offered visitors the opportunity to "make" the stripper strip and chat with her afterwards. The lobby poster for The Center of the World was certainly eye-catching. It shows a stripper suggestively sucking on a lollipop. The poster sums up Artisan’s promotion strategy; the company hawked the film the only way they could, as a sex(y) film. But the truth of the matter was (as with most advertising come-ons) at once different and in an important way less than satisfying. The Center of the World goes no-place closer to a cinematic real sex than its ostensible model, Last Tango in Paris, a picture Norman Mailer famously dismissed as

"a fuck film without a fuck — like a western without horses."[13]

Porn movies insist that what we're seeing is real in the most obvious physical sense of the term. Such films offer proof of this reality at regular intervals. But porn is also a performance; the sex is performed by professionals. So what's fake and what's not is not irrelevant, it's just a different sort of question. In The Center of the World, the film’s premise prohibits realization, it puts arbitrary limits on what can and can’t be shown.

The Center of the World grossed just over a million dollars in the spring and summer of 2001 and at one point played on 45 screens[14] — a lot for an indie sex title but insignificant in light of the average studio release at the time. Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, for example, released two months earlier, opened on over 3,200 screens.[15] Just as the rating system opens up the marketplace for Hannibal — an R-rated, disturbingly violent commercial film released by the major Hollywood studio MGM — it closes things down for adult-themed independents like The Center of the World.[16]

Real sex as realism

The vast majority of real-sex titles aspire to a cine-realism and "use" real sex on screen to further that claim. The Idiots (Lars von Trier, 1998), for example, does so in service of Dogme 95, a manifesto that demands of its practitioner a cinematic asceticism. The claustrophobic video scale of The Idiots, which was shot by the director Lars von Trier on videotape not only approximates a documentary realism (in his use of natural light and non-professional actors) but it also attends the formal markers of home-grown, amateur, gonzo porn. By the time we get to the real sex insert at the end of the film, the images seem to have less to do with hardcore than with Dogme, less to do with titillation than with a commitment to a cine-realism that encompasses style (all that shaky hand held video work) and content (the naked, human emotions on display, the moment at which the actors are no longer acting, they’re fucking).

In The Idiots, von Trier follows a group of young anarchists posing as crazy or mentally challenged “idiots” who descend upon bourgeois haunts to make a scene that is at once awkward, embarrassing and, funny. The film ends with a brief birthday orgy as the characters continue to play-act as idiots. In the original cut we see an erect penis and two shots of actual penetration. The shots appear within the flow of the scene; like everything else, erection and penetration are just some things that happen while the camera is running. The real sex inserts fit the larger ideological and cinematic goals of The Idiots; and while von Trier is a provocateur, his provocation at once exceeds and complicates the few seconds of real sex footage. As the Village Voice reviewer J. Hoberman points out, von Trier’s The Idiots “plumbs the depths of smirky neo-primitivism.”[17] The “smirk” is the key gesture here.

Despite the real-sex inserts, The Idiots was approved by censorship boards in over thirty European and Asian countries, but posed problems in two big markets: the UK and the US. In something of a prank, von Trier submitted in both the UK and the US two versions of the film — the original cut and a version with outsized black boxes covering up the offending genitalia, a comical gesture utilizing and lampooning the sort of black-box censorship routinely used in Japan. This too was a provocation — an attempt to poke fun at the arbitrary censorship in the UK and the US. But to the director’s surprise, censors in the UK gave the uncut film its seal of approval, albeit under its strictest release designation. As the British censorship board announced to the press:

“We considered the view of real sex and group sex to be so brief and so crucial to the story … that it was OK."[18]

Unsurprisingly, the MPAA looked only at the censored version and when they finally got back to von Trier, they asked for more black boxes. Von Trier complied and The Idiots opened quietly on two screens in April 2000 and grossed just over $7,000.

The realist impulse seems in play as well in the far more extensively explicit real sex French import Baise Moi. The film was directed by two women, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, neither with a previous credit behind the camera, though Thi is a veteran porn actress, having appeared in such films as 100% Blow Jobs Volume 4 (John Yuma, 2002). Baise Moi presents an unpretty case for the way many women are mistreated in contemporary society — a case made stronger, the directors argue, by the degree to which the actresses (Raffaela Anderson and Karen Lancaume, AKA Karen Bach)[19] and actors go to make that point. Authenticity then is not only a matter of cinematic proof, hence the penetration shots, the raw, documentary quality of the sex scenes, but it also signals a selfless dedication on the part of the players to their craft, a seriousness of purpose on the part of the filmmakers in the telling of the film's story.  

Real sex in Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise Moi (2000).

But such a cine-realism has its limits. The sex is real, but the violence in Baise Moi is staged. The rape that sets the plot in motion isn't a rape; the actors and actresses have, for money, agreed to play the scene as written. The penetration shot that punctuates the scene reveals a conflation on the part of the filmmakers between a sex scene (which they consistently play unflinchingly straight) and a violent scene (which, even given the filmmakers’ commitment to realism, must be staged, choreographed, and faked). The filmmakers may be on the smart or right or safe side of a double standard of sorts … but it’s still a double standard.

Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (2002) presents an unflinching and almost unwatchable pornographic violence.

A number of contemporary French films like Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone (1998) and Irreversible (2002) have a similar seriousness of purpose through an unflinching and thus almost unwatchable pornographic violence. Still, there are no claims that the actors themselves are hurt, that they must, in order to play these characters, experience in any real way the pain they suffer or inflict. While certain scenes in I Stand Alone, Irreversible, and Baise Moi are purposefully displeasing, these films' success depends on the sensation (within the film world, with audiences) created by the directors' refusal to temper the material. The films are thus at once realistic and sensational — X-treme films for a popular culture hooked on the X-games.

Real-sex inserts

A number of real sex films feature brief (and easily excised) hardcore images, what in the trade are called inserts. These hardcore images, often shot in close-up and in certain cases facilitating the use of body doubles (as in the Dogme 95 film The Idiots), are literally inserted into an otherwise conventional, simulated sex scene.

Foreign-made art films that transcend (and largely ignore) the prevailing censorship regime have been a staple of the art-house circuit since 1934 when Samuel Cummins arranged for the release of the notorious Czech film Ecstasy (Gustav Machaty), featuring Hedy Kiesler, later Hedy Lamarr, dashing through the woods in the buff. The use of a real sex insert in an otherwise softcore import screened uncut in the United States dates to Marco Bellochio’s 1986 feature, Devil in the Flesh, which features a single, medium-close shot of oral sex performed by the actress Maruschka Detmers on the actor Federico Pitzalis. The film reviewer Roger Ebert contended that the oral sex scene was in large part a publicity stunt, but after doing so, Bellocchio raised some interesting questions about the formal and ideological complications of real sex on screen:

“Bellocchio has at least assured a lot of attention for Devil in the Flesh by including an explicit and lengthy scene of fellatio in the movie, one that qualifies it for the X rating. Watching it, I wondered what it had to do with anything else in the story. That characters engage in a given sexual practice is one thing. That the camera shows them doing it for a longish period of time is another. Explicit sexuality has the strangest power to turn a narrative film into a documentary: The moment the characters take off their clothes and get down to business, we aren't looking at characters anymore, we're looking at naked actors.”[20]

The notorious oral sex insert in Marco Bellochio’s 1986 feature, Devil in the Flesh.

Patrice Cheareau’s Intimacy, a 2001 real sex insert film from Great Britain, was anxiously touted as a milestone in the history of film censorship. As AC Grayling from The Guardian newspaper wrote:

“[Intimacy] delivers an important blow to a ridiculous taboo" [regarding real sex on screen] by allowing such things [as an erect penis and an oral sex scene] to appear in mainstream cinema, rather than leaving them to the bracketed-off realm of pornography … it allows them to be incorporated more fully into [a] debate about life's natural experience."[21]

Intimacy, according to the reviewer, thus achieves a heightened cinematic realism because it depicts real and realistic sex. But it's not pornographic because it participates in a debate of sorts; its attraction is intellectual not carnal.

A month after Grayling’s article, a parallel story emerged in the pages of The Guardian, recalling Ebert’s contention that with real sex on screen “we aren't looking at characters anymore, we're looking at naked actors.” Still a full month before Intimacy's twenty-seven-screen UK first run, Alexander Linklater, the real life boyfriend and real sex partner of the film’s star Kerry Fox, weighed in on what it's like to live with a serious actress who has serious real sex on screen with another guy. Linklater wrote:

"I would … wait while [Kerry] left for rehearsals to practice sex with Mark, and [then come] back home. Then I would have to wait while she went on the set, undressed with Mark, took him in her arms, helped him reach a state of arousal, and came back home again. And eventually, I would have to watch, along with a sizable public, in the magnificent magnified detail of widescreen cinema, everything they'd done together. Or after editing, not quite everything. Which is the worst? Seeing nothing, or something, or everything?"[22]

Making art is often about taking chances and everyone involved in the production of Intimacy seems to have embraced that ideal. Still there were boundaries, limits. When President Bill Clinton maintained that he “did not have sex” with Monica Lewinsky, he was, according to a certain narrow definition of the phrase “to have sex,” telling the truth. It was a matter of semantics, perhaps, but it also reflected a certain attitude shared by a lot of Americans. Such a distinction proved useful for Linklater as well:

"The final question was, would they be having penetrative sex? Logical or not, that was the impassible barrier for me, and for Kerry also."

Later in the same interview:

"There is oral sex, which you see, and there is the extremely effective illusion of two ordinary people making desperate love."

So why show any real sex, however fleeting, however arbitrary, however limited and restricted (to one sort of act, once, with the stopwatch running)? Linklater's answer:

"It is to take the internal logic of a work of art to a conclusion; that is its integrity."[23]

But of course the actors don’t go all the way, and so the film, by this logic, doesn’t either.

Fox appreciated from the start that she was taking "a chance on the kind of sex Patrice (Chereau) was portraying in Intimacy.” Indeed she referred to a sort of artistic submission:

"I agreed to do [the film], to give myself over to Patrice and to trust him completely. That was the sort of agreement I made with myself, that I wouldn't get too precious, and, as a result, I really surprised myself and did work I didn't think possible."[24]

Fox's reflections here support her boyfriend’s assertion, however duplicitous and possibly insulting to his paramour, that while the sex in Intimacy looks real (and at one moment at least one of the intimate acts is),

"it is not particularly erotic." … “It doesn't blur the line between the art-house movie and [hardcore] video. It makes it clearer."

In her essay “Cinema and the Sex Act,” Linda Williams applauds the way Chereau uses explicitness to highlight what is (unlike hardcore) a relationship between two real (as in not air-brushed or surgically enhanced) people to whose real lives we seem to have gained intimate access. The film’s title, then, refers to the relationship between the two characters in the film, Jay and Claire, and also to the relationship between the viewer and the images on screen. For Williams, the key scene in Intimacy occurs when Claire takes Jay’s penis in her hand and strokes it — an intimate gesture that for many in the audience constitutes a real act (though perhaps not what they’d consider a real act of real sex).[25] Williams writes,

“While I do not suppose that this gesture is at all uncommon in the contemporary repertoires of heterosexual sex, I found myself shocked to see such an intimate, familiar gesture on film.”

For Williams, what makes the scene “shocking” — an interesting choice of words for an academic who is pretty hard to shock — is its capture of the commonplace. But if we accept Williams’ view of things, this scene in particular complicates the tentative and arbitrary distinctions drawn by Fox (no vaginal penetration) and by Linklater (no “sex”), because it questions our comfortable notions of acting and performing. In hardcore, acting is pretty much beside the point and performing is an end in itself. The characters in Intimacy are played by accomplished actors, but are they acting or performing? Or both? Williams argues:

“To ‘act’ a scene in which the action is sex is, in these explicit moments, to really engage in sex.”[27]

The goal of the real sex inserts in Intimacy is not to recreate a moment in the life of two fictional characters, but for the actors to capture and for the viewer to witness some sort of real intimacy that happens when the actors are asked to do more than just simulate some real physical act. If, as Williams suggests, the film succeeds on this score, the brief glimpses of real sex are not only not a gimmick, they are among the rare moments on film when what we are watching and investing and believing in is real.

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