One of the most reliably recurring recent talking points on the internet regarding movies, right up there with “Eyes Wide Shut is a Christmas movie,” is that sex scenes have disappeared from popular American cinema. Karina Longworth, host of You Must Remember This, has dedicated two seasons of her show to exploring this phenomenon, with “Erotic ‘80s” released last summer and “Erotic ‘90s” coming up next month. “Erotic ‘80s,” like all of Longworth’s series, is key for anyone interested in film history, and provides a detailed roadmap of the depiction of sex, sexuality, and the naked body on screen from the late-1970s far frontier of Pretty Baby to the reactionary AIDS allegory Jagged Edge in the mid-1980s, all the way to the Brat Pack and Rob Lowe’s sex scandal (which, like Eddie Murphy’s and Hugh Grant’s, no one seems to remember). I completely disagree with her take on Fatal Attraction and her sympathetic view of the psychopath played by Glenn Close, but I can’t say she doesn’t know what she’s talking about: an enormous amount of research goes into You Must Remember This, and besides Video Archives, there’s really no other podcast about movies worth listening to.
I look forward to her series on the 1990s, but vanishing sex scenes—something Longworth has noticed, too—didn’t really start until the 2010s. Obvious explanations abound: by the end of the first decade of the new millennium, high definition hardcore pornography could be easily streamed in minutes by anyone with Wi-Fi and a smartphone. In 2014, most of the world experienced the kind of cultural about-face that comes once in a generation, if that: Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” was the last gasp of a capitalist cultural industry that pumped out innuendo and obscenity for nearly half a century. That switch could be flipped any time, but it won’t, because there’s no money in selling singles about date rape anymore. There was in 2013, apparently.
Growing up and going to movies all the time in the late-1990s and early-2000s, thanks to the very lenient PG-13 rating that my parents always ignored, I saw a lot of sex before I really knew what it was. I saw Bowfinger when I was six, and was surprised by how explicit it was when I re-watched it in December: although Heather Graham is never nude, she spends the second half of the movie fucking everyone she can find in order to get ahead in Hollywood. It didn’t confuse me, because just a kiss and some attention from a beautiful woman made the reactions of the men make total sense: I, too, at six, would have dropped everything for a kiss on the lips from Heather Graham. Bowfinger is a loving ribbing of Hollywood’s sleazy side, mainly the depraved behavior of all the wannabes, hangers-on, messianic hacks, and outright predators. Graham’s character is fully aware of the casting couch system and blows past Steve Martin’s titular Bowfinger in terms of success, scoring dozens of connections by sleeping around. This wasn’t a dangerous or damaging film for a six-year-old to see.
If I didn’t have, at home, an ultimate reference for how to live and behave, the movies certainly wouldn’t have helped. Popular American cinema in the 2000s pushed, above all else, impossibly skinny and sexually available and adventurous women. Actors in their 20s and 30s have played high school students for all of film history, but only in 1999 could you make a film as graphic as American Pie, or as provocative as Cruel Intentions and Wild Things. It’s important to note the difference: Jason Biggs’ sexual activity in American Pie is a joke, culminating in the humiliating pie-fucking scene; the reason that Cruel Intentions and Wild Things were cutting edge at the end of the 1990s was because they feature young women playing high schoolers making out. Jason Biggs shows his ass while Selma Blair, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Neve Campbell, and Denise Richards perform serious softcore scenes.
Going into the 2000s, movies became even more graphically sexual, with indies like The Brown Bunny and Shortbus getting far more press than audience members, and now-forgotten movies like Black Snake Moan and Teeth promoting their “wild and exciting” sexual elements. The bloated and masturbatory comedies of Judd Apatow did nothing to make women anything more than talking fuckdolls in American cinema, and while Katherine Heigl may have been difficult to work with, her criticisms of the film and her collaborators can’t be dismissed as the complaints of a “shrew” like they were in 2007. As I go through many of the films I saw as a young kid and haven’t seen since, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that the 2000s were the most debauched, extreme, and damaging era when it comes to sex in the history of the American cinema.
Not much progress was made from the widespread adoption of sound in 1930 through about 1970: besides Otto Preminger’s chiseling away at the production code, movies didn’t again reach the level of sexual permissiveness that they had in the silent era until the late-1960s, and the 1970s were the only decade when pornography was cinema, produced, distributed, and exhibited in exactly the same way. When Gena Rowlands runs into her hoity-toity friends in 1971’s Minnie and Moskowitz, they say they’re about to head into a hippie bar “to see how the other half lives.” It’s reasonable to guess that those same bourgeois squares lined up to see Deep Throat next year, along with Last Tango in Paris. But both of those movies were rated X, and there was no adolescent shortcut except jacking off in the woods to magazines buried in the dirt.
For the next three decades, permissions kept expanding, culminating in 2013’s Blue is the Warmest Color, the blue movie that Burt Reynolds dreams of making at the end of Boogie Nights: screwing with a story. The film is lesbian pornography made by and for men, and like “Blurred Lines,” represents something of an apogee in contemporary sexual propaganda: pornography and cinema had finally, seemingly, merged. Deep Throat may have played some “normal” theaters, but I doubt the work of Radley Metzger or Andy Milligan had the same reach. In the 2000s, propaganda about big asses being bad and anything but stick-thin women being hideous was baked into so much commercial entertainment that wasn’t ostensibly sexual: the guys in Dude, Where’s My Car? are desperate to find their car only so that they can “get laid” with their twin girlfriends—who they’ve been dating for a year.
The earliest sound films to deal with sex frankly—Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Carnal Knowledge, The Graduate, Last Tango in Paris, Don’t Look Now—all did it with an appropriate gravity and tone. By the 1990s and 2000s, this was completely dispensed with, and hardcore sexual imagery and language seeped into mass entertainment. True, no one was fucking at length like Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, but that scene had a candor and a decidedly non-pornographic aspect: it remains one of the most realistic and romantic sex scenes in film history, and its messiness is in direct contrast to the punishing contortions and dimensions of pornography. Penetration may have eluded the silver screen, but pornography’s influence was never more felt on pop culture than in the decade I grew up going to the movies. Movie stars—specifically actresses—looked like porn stars, for the first and last time. Going through films of my youth, I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of a puritanical backlash against sex in media; considering how extreme things were just below the surface for so long, the pendulum has barely swung back to the middle.
—Follow Nicky Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith