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REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
We look over Matt’s (Kieran O’Brien’s) shoulder at Lisa (Margot Stilley) masturbating in Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004). The scene proves to be the turning point in the film.
A closer look (and tighter shot) of Lisa masturbating in Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004).
Two shots from the first of two graphic sex scenes that conclude 9 Songs shows real (oral) sex ....
... followed by a money shot.
The final sexual encounter between Matt and Lisa in 9 Songs includes this shot showing vaginal penetration. Note that he (Matt/Kieran O’Brien) is wearing a condom.
Matt and Lisa lounge in the tub in a quiet, reflective moment in 9 Songs.
Torture as entertainment in the 2007 horror film Saw IV (Darren Lynn Bousman).
The 1999 Korean film Lies offers a brief glimpse at a real sex act (of fellatio again), but unlike the real sex insert films discussed above, it features an astonishing on-screen sex to on-screen narrative ratio: by my stopwatch, 90% sex, 10% exposition.
One in a series of sadomasochistic encounters in the 1999 Korean film Lies (Jang Sun Woo).
Lies quite deliberately alludes to Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 real sex melodrama In the Realm of the Senses. Both films share a similar sex to narrative ratio (to the extent that the sex scenes are the narrative). Both use sex scenes of extended duration and of increasing intensity and personal risk to make clear the point that the characters are really obsessed with (having sex with) each other. Jang Sun Woo, the writer-director of Lies, endeavored to depict a couple — in this case the 18 year old schoolgirl Y (Kim Tae Yeon) and her thirtysomething sculptor paramour J (Lee Sang Hyun) — so absorbed in “their dream of living, eating, and fucking without having to work” that the trappings of bourgeois existence fade into the background. Woo accomplishes this by focusing so extensively on sex in scenes shot with hand-held cameras, what the Village Voice reviewer J. Hoberman described as “a loose, semi-verite” style.”[28][open endnotes in new window] The net effect is at once realistic and daunting, and the risk of (or is it the plan behind) including so much simulated sex is that by some point in the film we feel like we’ve seen enough (sex, whipping, etc.). It’s no longer fun for us and it doesn’t look like it’s much fun anymore for Y and J. Sitting through it all is I suppose a necessary process by which we recognize the distinction between a love affair (the codes of which we readily recognize on screen) and whatever sort of mutual abuse the characters in Lies indulge in when the sex games so completely take over their lives (and the film).
A sequence late Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 real sex melodrama In the Realm of the Senses shows the lovers experimenting with sex and death.
The 2004 British import 9 Songs, directed by Michael Winterbottom, similarly tracks an intense relationship through a series of intense sex scenes and like both Lies and In the Realm of the Senses, narrative is expressed physically, sexually on screen. 9 Songs presents a series of explicit, real sex scenes interrupted briefly by live concert footage featuring contemporary rock bands. The sex in 9 Songs is real. While it is far less shocking than the real sex in Baise Moi (which is used mostly to disturb us) and far more fun for everyone concerned (the characters and the viewer) than in Romance, it is used (as it is in these other real sex films) to make somehow more real the clearly fictional lives of the characters in the film.
Such a realist strategy neatly fits Winterbottom’s oeuvre. He is an auteur who has successfully mixed fiction and fact in such films as the political thriller Welcome to Sarajevo (1994), his valentine to the Manchester music scene 24 Hour Party People (2002) and most recently A Mighty Heart (2007), the political melodrama about the abduction of the journalist Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman) and his wife Marianne’s (Angelina Jolie) failed attempt to save him. In each of these films, Winterbottom breaks down the markers of fact and fiction with documentary-style camerawork, real lighting, real locales, frequent strategic shifts from conventional third person fictional storytelling to videotaped interviews that break the fourth wall, and home-video-style footage that seems to capture life — real life — as it unfolds. Winterbottom has also used explicit (albeit simulated) sex scenes in films like Jude (a 1996 adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure) and the steamy melodrama I Want You (1998). Both films contain full frontal nudity and explicit simulated sex scenes featuring major (legit) female film stars: Kate Winslet in Jude and Rachel Weisz in I Want You. This strategy suggests that the work is so absorbing and powerful, that (even) these commercially successful actresses were willing to go further (they were willing to show more skin) than in any other film.
9 Songs is composed almost entirely of documentary footage. The concerts are shot live in real venues. The cameras move through the club just as the patrons must in such a hectic, crowded space, and we never get the sense that these scenes are rehearsed or “produced.” They are simply recorded. The sex scenes seem also to be documented as opposed to performed for the camera, and even the handful of seemingly random domestic scenes seem captured as they happen. There’s no effort made to integrate scenes into anything resembling a narrative. Indeed, the effect is that Winterbottom has picked up random moments in a relationship that is, finally, little more than the sum of sexual acts. They eat. They fuck. They go to concerts. What little narrative trajectory we get is expressed in the bedroom. For example, we get a hint that the relationship is in trouble not from anything they say, but from a sexual act. In what begins as just another random domestic scene, we see Matt (Kieran O’Brien) as he is preparing dinner. Eventually, he wanders over to the bedroom to find Lisa (Margot Stilley). She’s in bed masturbating. He watches, and thus we watch from his point of view, as the scene takes us from her arousal to orgasm. But while the scene is plenty erotic — for him and for us — we also recognize that she is taking care of business without him, a plot point of some power thanks to a single reaction shot that lets us know that Matt knows what this scene means. When Lisa later tells him that she’s leaving for the United States, Matt is hurt but not surprised.
The masturbation scene is the film’s true turning point, the 2/3 mark at which their relationship begins to move towards closure. The scene immediately precedes the film’s two most explicitly depicted encounters: the first, a long oral sex scene (Lisa taking Matt’s penis in her mouth) — a sequence that is punctuated by a money shot. The second scene attends their last bout of intercourse and includes shots proving vaginal penetration. These two scenes show the characters clinging to the one thing that really worked in their relationship. They lived together for a while and went to some concerts. Then she left. The effect is the rather politically conservative notion that absent love, sex is just sex. And no matter how hard Matt tries to render the story in romantic terms, the film’s real sex, itself divorced of love (the actors after all are doing a job and the documentary-style camera captures that labor), so dominates the film, so clearly is what the film is about, that there is no room at the end for sentiment.
Winterbottom’s original scheme for 9 Songs was fairly simple. As he explained in an interview,
“I wanted to see if you could take a very simple premise — two people in bed making love — if you filmed it closely enough, honestly enough and in enough detail, maybe you could capture something of the atmosphere of a relationship, something of the atmosphere of being in love, without seeing much beyond that.”
Given such a premise, the “heart of the film [would be] sex.” And in the film there is little else.
Real sex U.S. style
U.S.-made real sex films compose a fairly small indie genre. Virtually all are released Unrated, which is to say that they are never submitted to the MPAA. Real sex films are screened at only very select art-houses. This is less a matter of censorship than basic economics. Art-houses are generally independently owned. Independent theater owners live and work in the community and depend in large part on a loyal and local customer base. Before screening a real sex film, the art-house theater owner must asses the risks of showing such a picture to his/her customers. Also worrisome is the risk of pissing off fellow local businessmen or worse the city management (with its host of fire, health and building inspectors).
Domestic real sex titles are seldom released to more than a handful of theaters and most are difficult (or even impossible) to find on DVD. Case in point: Larry Clark’s Ken Park (2002), which loosely tracks the lives of some young men and women slacking their way through the boredom and emptiness of suburban life in Visalia, California. Clark, a still photographer who specializes in disturbing portraits of disturbed, alienated teenagers is best known to U.S. art-house filmgoers for his 1999 film about urban skater-punks, Kids, a documentary-style film rather dominated by scenes of simulated teen sex performed by actors who look shockingly young. Clark utilizes the same documentary-style in Ken Park: hand-held camera, non-professional actors, real locations, and natural lighting to lend a realistic cast to a fictional story. But while Kids stopped short of showing real sex on screen, Ken Park ends with an explicit male-female-male threesome that includes explicitly depicted oral sex and intercourse. The un-simulated sex scene seems in many ways just another stunt for a director whose work seems designed to exploit our worst fears about the lives of the young and restless. As Michael Rechtshaffen of the Hollywood Reporter wrote about the film:
“Given Clark’s preoccupation with teens in their underpants (and out of them), the is-it-art-or-is-it-exploitative-smut debate isn’t going to be settled anytime soon.”[29]
The real sex sequence in Larry Clark’s Ken Park (2002).
Ken Park played to packed houses at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, but Clark initially failed to find a domestic distributor for the film. It was eventually picked up by Vitagraph Films, the distributor of the low budget Bruce Campbell tour de force, Bubba Ho-tep (Don Coscarelli, 2002) and little else even the most avid art-house patron might recognize. To date, Ken Park has not been released on DVD in the U.S. The film is thus notorious but little seen.
Also little seen but much talked-about is Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, which ends with a three minute oral sex scene. Like Ken Park and many of the European art-porn films, The Brown Bunny is shot in a realist style. Gallo makes use of a low budget, naturally-lit look and he uses non-professional actors in significant roles. Such an aesthetic supports Gallo’s contention that the final real sex scene is just an extension of an already insistent cinematic realism and a seriousness of purpose in which the actors, in this case Gallo himself and his then girlfriend, the actress Chloe Sevigny, are willing to do anything for their art. In a review for the New York Times Manohla Dargis put the final scene in a peculiar but nonetheless illuminating context:
“Even in the age of girls gone wild it's genuinely startling to see a name actress throw caution and perhaps her career to the wind. But give the woman credit. Actresses have been asked and even bullied into performing similar acts for filmmakers since the movies began, usually behind closed doors. Ms. Sevigny isn't hiding behind anyone's desk. She says her lines with feeling and puts her iconoclasm right out there where everyone can see it; she may be nuts, but she's also unforgettable.”[30]
The critical consensus, especially with regard to the film’s initial Cannes Film Festival cut, was that the director Vincent Gallo is nuts too. The Screen International poll held annually at the festival gave The Brown Bunny its lowest rating ever. The popular film reviewer Roger Ebert hated the film:
“In May of 2003 I walked out of the press screening of Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny at the Cannes Film Festival and was asked by a camera crew(member) what I thought of the film. I said I thought it was the worst film in the history of the festival. That was hyperbole — I hadn't seen every film in the history of the festival — but I was still vibrating from one of the most disastrous screenings I had ever attended.”
Gallo responded by calling Ebert “a fat pig.” Ebert countered:
“I will one day be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny.”
Ebert proceeded to lose over eighty pounds. And Gallo, still the director of The Brown Bunny, cut almost 30 minutes from the film’s two-hour running time, cuts that prompted Ebert to revise his initial impression of the film. In his far more positive review of the 93 minute release cut of The Brown Bunny, Ebert had the following to say about the final scene:
Writer, director, actor Vincent Gallo claimed that the real (oral) sex sequence that ends The Brown Bunny (2003) was the logical end point for the film’s insistent cinematic realism.
The most successful U.S. real sex film to date is John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, which opened on just six screens in October 2006, then on positive word-of-mouth expanded to over sixty screens in its third week of release. The film eventually grossed nearly $2 million, a respectable run for any art house film, let alone one with ample gay-male content.[32]
What distinguishes Shortbus from previous real sex indies and imports is its exuberance, the notion that sex (and sex on film) might actually be fun. This hearkens back to the “different strokes for different folks” spirit of the groundbreaking 1972 porn film Deep Throat, which promoted an egalitarianism, a democracy of on-screen sex. Several mainstream reviewers celebrated Mitchell’s novel approach. David Ansen of Newsweek wrote:
“Other films (mainly foreign) have certainly given us totally explicit sex before. Think of Catherine Breillat’s Romance and Anatomy of Hell. Or the grittily aggressive Baise Moi. But these were all films that rewarded prurience with punishment (in the form of either graphically unpleasant sex or windy French philosophizing). Mitchell brings an all-American cheerfulness to his sex romp, a native-born faith in the therapeutic benefits of unfettered desire.”
With regard to the film’s orgy finale, Ansen shrugged off all the real sex on screen, concluding,
The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis similarly commented upon the film’s happy feel:
“Mr. Mitchell isn’t the first nonpornographic filmmaker to incorporate sexually explicit material into his work, but he may be the most optimistic and good natured.”[34]
The orgy sequence at the end of John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006).
Dargis went so far as to assert that the final scene in Shortbus offers not only an answer for the lonely twentysomethings in the film but a model for filmmakers in Hollywood:
“Mr. Mitchell finds his happy ending in raucous music and warm caresses, in an oceanic feeling in which everyone is free to be freakily you and me. His idealism is pleasingly touching and just maybe a bit naïve. It’s an idealism that feels out of place next to the hot-to-trot television housewives, panting pop divas, cringingly graphic memoirs and novels in which sex is an index of late capitalism at its most bleak. Certainly it’s deeply, if promisingly, at odds with an U.S. movie mainstream that has grown progressively more prudish about sex over the last three decades, while its representations of violence have grown more obscenely violent. Hollywood says let it bleed. Mr. Mitchell would rather we get off on life.”[35]
Parting glances
Regimes of censorship are inevitably capricious, ambiguous, and inconsistent, yet they reflect upon the culture they serve in ways that are at once telling and troubling. The Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), which rates films for the MPAA, makes possible the wide release of R-rated torture films like Saw and Hostel, yet offers no “legitimate” designation for a sweet-natured (adults-only) real-sex film like Shortbus. Saw IV, the R-rated installment of the popular torture film series released during the same twelve month period as Shortbus, opened on more than 3,000 screens nationwide and grossed over $60 million in its first 2 months in release. That’s 2,940 more screens than the reigning real-sex box office champion Shortbus reached at its peak and roughly thirty times its theatrical gross.
There’s more to this than the obvious double standard at the MPAA regarding sex and violence. The Shortbus/Saw IV comparison reveals the ways in which industrial policy and practice drives cultural standards. In the marginalization of art-house porn and in the mainstream commercial success of disturbingly violent horror films, we find our society not so much mirrored but reified by MPAA censorship policies and procedures. We are fascinated by violence in even its most extreme and hideous representation, and we are willing to indulge this fascination with few (if any) limits. Sex, especially real sex, makes us nervous … so nervous that if it can be shown (in any legitimate venue) it must be, it better be “art.” Art has become as much a matter of commerce as aesthetics. That is, by labeling something art you pretty much guarantee a small audience, one that is marginal to (and systematically marginalized by) U.S. pop culture.
Looking back on that evening in 1964 at Stanley Kubrick’s house, the notion of a commercially viable real-sex film was little more than a passing subject of drunken or stoned speculation. No doubt, once sober, everyone at the gathering appreciated that there was little hope that such a film could be made at the time. Now, well over forty years later, we’re really no closer to seeing a real-sex studio film. But we have seen the mainstreaming of a sort of horrific violence that would have been no less unthinkable in 1964. So let’s ask the obvious question: which is the more obscene: Shortbus or Saw IV ? I think it is an easy question to answer, but one the film industry is disinclined to examine or discuss. Commenting on the writhing bodies in the climactic orgy scene in Shortbus, a character exclaims (speaking as much to the images on screen as to our present cultural predicament):
“It’s just like the 60s, only with less hope.”
It’s a curious pay-off line for such an upbeat film, but nonetheless telling.
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