What Sex Onscreen Says about Us

A 2006 film review of mine makes a semi-regular appearance as one of The Tyee’s most read articles. I can assure you it’s not the content of the essay, but the words “sex” and “movie” at the roots of the essay’s popularity. Journalism may be struggling, but horniness is forever, I guess.

That sex is popular on the internet is as obvious as saying the sky is blue. Online pornography is so ubiquitous that the fact that folks continue to search for X-rated content in mainstream cinema seems almost quaint. But perhaps there is something else at work here. Whether or not there is a generational difference that shapes how sex is perceived in film, how we think about and understand the most intimate aspects of human experience has shifted wildly over time. This ongoing evolution often plays out in movies. No doubt it will continue to do so.

Much has been made of the idea that generation Z does not enjoy sex scenes in movies. A widely cited October 2023 study from the University of California, Los Angeles, noted that nearly half, 47.5 per cent, of 13-to-24-year-old survey respondents felt television shows and movie plots didn’t need sexual content. Fifty-one per cent wanted to see more focus on friendships and platonic relationships. Following this logic, sex in contemporary cinema appears to have fallen out of favour, along with other old-fashioned stuff like landline phones and driving stick.

But the act itself has not gone away. It’s as common as dirt and just as easy to access. Long gone are the days of having to sneak The Joy of Sex from your parents’ bookcase or flipping through literary works in search of the raunchy passages. Dog-eared pages from D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, I miss ye. While the internet is rife with a rainbow of sexual flavours, it’s just not the same as the funky, lived-in intimacy of cinematic and literary genres.

In spite of the oft-discussed anti-prurient slant of younger people’s film tastes, 2023 was a pretty good year for cinematic sex. In Oppenheimer, it was the central character exploding with his mistress. In Barbie, the heart of the film was about navigating complicated romantic relationships. Though the plastic Barbie universe barred any live-action, um, action, sex was still there, in multiple ways. After all, the original Barbie was modelled after a German doll named Lilli, herself based on a seductive cartoon character that was initially marketed to adults as a gag gift.

As the former owner/operator of a legion of Barbies, I can assure you that the things they (the Barbies) were most preoccupied with was smoking cigarettes and having sex. In that order. Given that I had only the vaguest notions of what those entailed, it was mostly just mashing Barbie on top of G.I. Joe and laughing hysterically. But I digress.

In ‘Poor Things,’ sex is liberation

In the past year, no film engaged more energetically with the transformative power of sex than Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. Based on the 1992 novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, the film follows Bella Baxter (played by Emma Stone) and her search for bodily and spiritual liberation.

After being reanimated from the dead by a Frankenstein-like scientist named Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe in some truly frightening prosthetics), Bella embarks on a journey of discovery, beginning with the pleasures of masturbation. Also a producer for the film, Stone performs multiple sex scenes throughout.

In her quest to understand the wider world, Bella undertakes a picaresque journey that involves a great deal of sex. In these sequences, she learns not only about the range of carnal appetites, but also of socialism, emancipation and other vagaries of the human condition, from politics to poverty. No bones about it, Poor Things is resolutely forthright about the joys of the flesh. The sex throughout the film runs the gamut — but whatever form or position, it is an instrument of self-knowledge, liberation and arguably revolution. It is also the beating heart of the film itself. It is impossible to imagine the story without it.

Like the great innocents before her, Bella’s journey reveals that the rules governing polite society are often nonsensical, arbitrary and painfully repressive, especially for women. In this aspect, Poor Things offers a gleefully subversive take on intellectual freedom and social convention. While sex is a path to understanding in the film, it’s not the only one. Books, science and other people are also a conduit for Bella to better contend with the world and make her own way within it. That she does so with aplomb makes for a climactic resolution.

Intimacy as a lens on the human condition

Other recent films have made interesting use of sex that says as much about the work of the filmmakers as it does about how we live now. One such example is Passages. Directed by Ira Sachs, the story involves a gay couple whose relationship is upended when one of the men embarks on an affair with a woman. The sex scenes in the film are frank and honest, shot with a directness that is both disarming and engaging. The language of bodies — their suffering, pleasure, even ambivalence and uncertainty — is rendered with explicit tenderness.

In a similar vein, director Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers stars a pair of dreamboats in the form of Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. Like Passages, Strangers also uses intimacy as a means of understanding loneliness and despair, as well as fleeting moments of unbounded joy.

So maybe the purported drought of sex in movies has been somewhat overblown. But there’s also something missing from the latest crop of films. One need only look to earlier examples of films that took sex seriously. Ken Russell’s The Devils is a case in point.

Based on a real historical incident, the film stars Vanessa Redgrave as a nun who is sexually obsessed with a priest (played by Oliver Reed at his most toothsome). The film recently made an appearance on the Criterion Channel. It was as though the cinephiles, long deprived, were handed a thrilling Christmas present. A veritable stampede to the small screen ensued. Rewatching the film, it makes its modern antecedents seem tame and tepid by comparison.

While the stakes in contemporary films like Passages are agonizing to the immediate participants, they do not carry the same whiff of fire, brimstone and eternal damnation that animates a film like The Devils, where carnal desire offers a quick trip to getting burnt at the stake. Now that’s hot!

Critic Tim Lucas, writing about The Devils, summed up the film’s intent as “not merely an indictment of 17th-century conspiracies, but an indictment of political agendas which have been with us throughout the course of human history.”

It is interesting to look at the bigger picture of what sex actually means in these different films. Transformation, liberation, connection, sure, but also power, control — the cornucopia of what it means to be human.

Sex has been and will continue to be at the centre of existence. Its censure and limitation will invariably be short-lived. But movies are also economic engines, as much about making money as making anything else. As appetites change, so too do films.

Maybe even more interesting is what is happening outside of the movie theatre, as politics continue to play out in people’s bedrooms, and the true nature of sex continues to wend its way through culture and history. It means different things to different folks, of course. It’s a biological imperative, a fundamental force of nature, a site of fun and freaky frolics, yes, yes, yes to all those, and even more.