Cinema and The Complexity of Desire
One Swallow Doesn't Make a Summer
Some insist that sex is back, whether it is The Substance, Babygirl, Poor Things, Challengers, Die, My Love, or Love Lies Bleeding. Noticing this return to sex in cinema. Lisa Laman notes: “2023 features like Oppenheimer, Saltburn, Poor Things, Mars One, and so many others kept the tradition of unforgettable cinema sex scenes alive and well. These features were especially vibrant in their embrace of sex, given that mainstream American cinema of the 2010s was largely devoid of notable scenes concerning afternoon delight.’ (Collider) Adrian Horton says that “Hit Man is the latest film this year to suggest that Hollywood is trying to bring sexiness, if not always actual sex, back to the big screen, at a time of superhero fatigue, years of relative sexlessness on screen and routine box office woe.” (Guardian) Yet in most of these movies, the sex seems incidental, a sub-category of the film’s main focus - two men’s competing affections for the love object in Challengers, staying young in The Substance, female emancipation in Poor Things. Only Babygirl is almost exclusively about desire, and why, of all the new films, we will attend to it in some detail, while chiefly looking back on the cinematic representation of what we’ll call psychological sex on screen. We offer the term psycho-sexual to differentiate it from pornography and eroticism, accepting that pornography prioritises genital exposure and interaction; eroticism, the body in surroundings that often allow for the exotic erotic, with grand houses, foreign adventures, and luxury apartments all central to bringing out the pleasures of the flesh, through materialist elaboration. Pornography needn’t always forego the psychological and, if often in a predictable manner, eroticism incorporates it, but a psychologically sexual cinema perhaps needs to predicate itself on a paradox, or maybe nothing more than a discontent that runs contrary to a chosen life.
In Babygirl, Nicole Kidman is a prominent and a very successful businesswoman who starts an affair with an intern. During sex with her husband, Romy says to him that, in all their years together, she has never achieved orgasm. Is she telling the truth, or no longer aware of receiving pleasure through him and blurts it out in frustration? We don’t know for sure, but what is unequivocal is the sexual ecstasy she feels with this young lover. When she throws out her remark, it may remind the viewer a little of one Kidman offered twenty-five years earlier in that most psychological of sex-oriented films, Eyes Wide Shut. There she tells her husband, Dr Bill Haford, that she could easily have left him years earlier, if only an officer she knew she couldn’t have resisted had come over to their table and asked him to leave with her. When she offers this story to her husband, she is high on weed and determined to prove there is more to desire than the conventional, as she tries to tease out of him any erotic fantasies he has over his patients, or desires they may have for him. We can’t say for sure whether he is being naive or hypocritical, and, more importantly, we aren’t sure if Alice is offering her comment to damage his assured ego or if she is telling the truth. When the film moves into the past and shows Alice making love to the naval man, this isn’t her flashback but Bill’s, and it isn’t a flashback, of course, but an imagining. Alice offers a story about what could have happened, and Bill thinks of it as it might have.
Stanley Kubrick’s film is more intricate than that, but central to the psychologically sexual is whether the film proposes that the mind is very actively involved in the desire it seeks. This isn’t quite the same as saying the films are psychoanalytic explorations of desire, even if they may possess a dimension of the Freudian or the Kleinian, may propose that the problem rests in a character’s childhood years and focuses on the mother, as in Klein, or may see it as about repressed instincts and Oedipal complexities, as in Freud. When Dominique Aubry, who wrote The Story of O, said of the older man the young central character is obsessively obedient towards, that it 'links to a desire for one's father. He is a father figure,’ we aren’t surprised. We can find many such figures in the erotic cinema of the 1970s to the early eighties, often from France, and ones a decade later, usually American. Yet if most of these erotic films (Emmanuelle, Madame Claude, Vanessa, Zandalee, 9/12 Weeks, Wild Orchid)are of any value at all, it won’t rest on the complexity of their psychology, but on the elaboration of their locales. Some thought and lots of money have gone into making them, as they are shot in various parts of the world to give an exotic mise-en-scene to the desire of the main female characters. Sexual imagination meets consumerism, and lust is laid out against the backdrops of Rio, Bangkok and Hong Kong; in beautiful Southern mansions and enormous New York apartments. Whether the psychological problems concern a divorce (9 1/2 Weeks), a messy religious upbringing (Vanessa) or the father issue Aubry invokes in The Story of O, these wouldn’t be enough to make the films psychologically sexual as we are looking to define it. Sometimes a film will contain this aspect psychologically, but choose not to develop it sexually, and thus wouldn’t quite pass for the psychologically sexual as a consequence. Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee is a good example: a film that creates a very specific sexual object (a girl’s knee) but retreats from it sexually, all the better to amplify it psychologically. The man wishes to prove that he can find a way to touch an indifferent girl’s knee without her being any the wiser to the wager he sets up with his female writer friend, nor even especially aware that he is touching her knee, as he manages to do in a moment of crisis in the young woman’s life.
Yet Rohmer’s subjectivity offers a good example of what the sexually psychological will contain: narrativisations of desire predicated on singular yearnings. If the film simply proposes that desire is a product of psychology, if it claims that desire has little more than a symptomatic role to play in the sexual, this would be of little interest, even if it might be more broadly psychoanalytically valid. However, our purpose is to see the sexual as an active force, in itself, and not as a representational one for someone’s ‘issues’. What is important then is the ‘masochistic’ tendency, if we think of Gilles Deleuze’s perspective on Masoch’s ideas, and contrast them with his thoughts on Sadism. “In masochism…we are told that this is about people who seek suffering; this is what we could call the superficial interpretation of masochism, people seeking pain, who love pain, that’s it. By having oneself be punished.” But Deleuze says, “the masochist is not at all someone who either seeks pain or seeks pleasure by oblique or devious means. His or her interest is entirely elsewhere. The masochist is someone who in his or her own way, only in a perverse way…experiences very narrowly that the desire is a continuous process, and therefore is horrified, is horrified affectively, is horrified by anything that might come to interrupt the process.” (Deleuze Seminars) Guilt and punishment become secondary features, and desire, as desire, the paramount one. The masochist desires desire in a tautology that needn’t become a vicious circle, but instead an elaborate set. We can put aside the whips and leather as no more than the cliches of guilt and punishment, a pop-psychological masochism; seeking, instead, the mise en scene of the masochistic. When Deleuze disagrees with Freud over masochism, it rests partly on Freud’s claim that “sadomasochism operates within one and the same individual. ” Instead, the masochist is distinct from the sadist if we assume that the sadist seeks permutation and the masochist elaboration. Freud may have distinguished two types of sadists, as Deleuze notes: the one who only seeks power and domination; the other is hedonistic and seeks to inflict pain on others. But what distinguishes the masochist from the sadist for us is that the sadist exhausts the possible, and the masochist tries to extend it infinitely.
To understand an aspect of this, let us return again to cinema. While numerous filmmakers, in however imaginatively impoverished a manner, were making works of erotic exoticism, which shared similarities with the masochistic, Pier Paolo Pasolini was adapting Sade’s Salo, 120 Days of Sodom to the screen. During the filming, he reckoned: “my film is planned as a sexual metaphor, which symbolises, in a visionary way, the relationship between exploiter and exploited. In sadism and in power politics human beings become objects. That similarity is the ideological basis of the film.” (Film Quarterly) This is clearly a sadistic projects and one might wonder if masochism is the reverse — if sadism wishes to turn subjects into objects, does masochism try to turn objects into subjects, or at least states of subjectivity? Deleuze notes the culturalism in Masoch: “the aesthetic aspect which is expressed in the model of art and suspense, and the juridical aspect which is expressed in the model of the contract and of submission.” (Masochism) It would be a masochistic project, we might say, to turn a subject and object back and forth, between a sculpture and a human, between the torturer and the tortured. At the beginning of Vampyros Lesbos, there are two women: one dressed, looking at the mirror and then slowly disrobing. The other is fixed as if a statue. The first woman removes some items and places them on the second, who shows hints at life. In the relatively recent Chose Secretes, a woman writhes on a bed before getting up and crossing the room, as we realise it is a stage set and people are looking on. In The Story of O, a lover bursts into a house and goes up the stairs to find the central character standing chained and naked, as the camera moves in on her, and we notice a weight attached to her pierced labia. The man looks aghast; she looks triumphant.
All three scenes are masochistic if we accept the condition of the masochist, as Deleuze defines it, when he speaks of the aesthetic aspect and the juridical condition. Vampyros Lesbos matches perfectly Deleuze’s description: “the scenes in Masoch have of necessity a frozen quality, like statues or portraits, they are replicas of works of art, or else they duplicate themselves in mirrors…” (Masochism) Hardly surprising then, that Jess Franco directed Venus in Furs two years before, though he did adapt Sade’s Justine the same year. In Choses secretes, again, we have the aesthetic in the private moment that turns into a public display, while In The Story Of O, the lover might think he is saving the woman from despair, but that is to misconstrue what is happening to her. Objectively, it might look like she is suffering, and in some ways she will be, but in others she is in ecstasy, and this is what she seeks. We will say more later how the exotic erotic dissolves the categories of the sadistic and the masochistic that Deleuze so insists should be kept separate, when he says, "the unity of sadism and masochism is simply taken for granted. Our intention has been to show that this approach only leads to very crude and differentiated concepts.” (Masochism)
Such a distinction might be intellectually valid, but film is often a crude medium, and erotic cinema has no interest in fine conceptual differentiations. We should also note that while one may talk of juridical contracts, many a feminist and more recent observer might look back on many of these films with horror, seeing in them an objectification too far, a misogyny too evident. Gillianren says, “there’s only so often I want to hear that explanation in a decade where a Best Actress winner was an evil nurse with almost no screentime. Where the next year, the winner was the evil personification of television. Where not one Best Picture winner had a female perspective character, and some of them barely had female characters at all.” (TheSolute.Com) Here she is talking about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Network; how much harsher would she and others be on the films we have already discussed? Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Choses Secretes films may be of a more recent vintage (2002), but he started making films in the 1960s, and 2002 was the year Brisseau was arrested and eventually given a fine and one-year suspended jail sentence for cajoling women into sex acts during auditions, promising them roles that didn’t necessarily materialise. Yet we are talking chiefly about the material on the screen rather than the production histories, however appalling. There will be similar scandals in the porn industry, but it is the presentation of the images that matter to us here, not the dubiousness that goes into their manifestation, even if in so coalescing a medium as film, it isn’t always easy to separate subject (the person playing the role) from the object (the character they play). It would seem absurd to have an intimacy coordinator for the way a writer arranges their sex scenes on the page; in film, one may disagree with their presence, but it isn’t preposterous.
Though our purpose isn’t to explore the fascinating question of subject and object, and actor and character, part of our aim is to examine what subjects and objects within the world of sex in cinema happen to be. The erotic, we believe, subjectifies, while porn usually (but far from always)objectifies: with the masochistically subjective central to the erotic, and the sadistically objective, a central feature of the pornographic. It would be too easy a conflation but hardly a useless one to propose the erotic exotic absorbs the masochistic; the pornographic fulfils the logic of the sadistic. The question of the psychological sex film is how it navigates these poles, even if there will be exotic erotic films that can pass for the psychological sex film, and porn cinema that can do so as well. But, generally, their purpose is different. If we are right to see that the work of eroticism makes of objects subjects (out of Masoch) and in the pornographic subjects objects (out of Sade), the psychological sex film wants to acknowledge the psychology of the individual navigating a world that could turn into one of alive sexuality, or deadening repetition.
Babygirl director Halina Reijn’s claims that “for me the sexuality is only a metaphor for a woman in an existential crisis. Underneath it is just a person who cannot integrate all these different parts of herself and that’s relatable.” (BFI) This would be central to defining the psychologically sexual film as long as the sex remains central, while we may also note that Reijn defines sexual desire masochistically: her character is “drawn to structured ways of dealing with inner desire.” (BFI) Now, if we propose in a broad generalisation that the erotic exotic draws from masochism, and the pornographic from Sade, then even if we accept Deleuze’s insistence that the Sadean and the Masochistic are not bedfellows, they are at opposite ends of a spectrum that the psychosexual film navigates. Babygirl reflects this navigation and is closer to the masochistic if we accept that Romy wants to dilute her own professional power into a situational submission that nevertheless plays by the rules, the sort of rules she has clearly practised for years in her career and where hierarchy is of immense importance. What could be more antithetical to this than allowing a lowly intern to dictate the terms of their sexual encounters? He might be smart and confident, but these aspects are chiefly a consequence of his assumptions about sexual desire, and that he knows what Romy needs.
From an obvious perspective, some might insist this is potentially a sado-masochistic fantasy made in heaven, with Romy finding in her desperate desire a young man who can indifferently take advantage of her. But we should go along just a little with Deleuze’s insistence that sadism and masochism are not symmetrical. As he says: ‘A popular joke tells of the meeting between a sadist and a masochist; the masochist says: ‘Hurt me.’ The sadist replies: ‘No.’ This is a particularly stupid joke, not only because it is unrealistic but because it foolishly claims competence to pass judgment on the world of perversions. It is unrealistic because a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim …” (Masochism). In Babygirl, it is Romy’s masochism that is important, not any assumptions about Samuel (Harris Dickerson). This is also the case in many an erotic film where women rely on a man to help them sexually emancipate, whether the man is older, younger or the same age, wealthy or impoverished, in European or American films. Even if the woman ends up half-destroyed or even dead, this doesn’t give agency to the man, but reflects on the woman’s needs. They might push those needs further than they ought to for their well-being, but that is different from saying the man pushes them into the situations.
This might be the bad faith of the genre, with mainly male directors giving the impression of agency all the better to fulfil their own fantasies as sadistic control freaks organising narratives of dominance. Yet some of the best known were based on books or experiences by and of women (sometimes adapted by eroticism’s most successful 70s purveyor, Just Jaeckin, with Emmanuelle, The Story of O, and Madame Claude all fitting this description). While Sacher-Masoch’s texts are mainly about men dominated by women, even if this reversal shows numerous ladies in erotic cinema disrobed and sexually violated, nevertheless, the principle behind Masoch’s work remains: the dominance isn’t coercively sadistic, but manipulatively masochistic. In other words, men often either do what they are told or are there functionally to accommodate a woman’s emancipation, however debased, troublesome or dangerous.
This is clearly the case in Babygirl, even if it might seem that Romy is the weaker individual in the relationship. She embarks on the affair predicated on personal dissatisfaction, not on the controlling forces of the younger man. He facilitates her desires; he doesn’t dominate her life. We see this contrast late in the film when a member on the company board tries to blackmail her for sexual favours, and she responds in disgust. This isn’t just or even especially because the man is older and far less attractive than Samuel — that would be to misconstrue the nature of Romy’s desire and to presume she would reject him for this reason. It is also, and much more importantly, that he would have no role to play in her desires. The board member might see a woman looking for extra-marital affection, and he is in a position to administer this and to manipulate her on the assumption he has power over her. But he is thinking within a set of psychological assumptions that have nothing to do with how Romy has constructed her sexual imaginary.
It is partly such a response that makes the film psychologically sexual; she wouldn’t be turning the man down because she wants a younger, prettier lover, nor even that he is a sleazy figure trying to bribe her into sex now that she is compromised and has already cheated on her husband. It rests on an asymmetry to which he would be oblivious, an asymmetry that has even been in her marital life for many years, if we accept Romy’s comment about her inability to orgasm with her spouse. A marriage, it seems, can last for decades and have at its centre a symmetrical catastrophe, a tragic structure of emotional feeling that can perhaps survive through denial or sublimation. It can only be defeated by symmetrical lust.
The symmetrical isn’t quite the same thing as mutual desire, and might have almost nothing to do with what would usually be called complicity. When Samuel proposes Romy drinks a glass of milk he orders as she sits on the other side of the bar, this is not because he is drinking the same thing, and they share in a moment of knowing intimacy while far apart; it is closer to a sexual assumption on Samuel’s that this is the power he has over her and he can dictate the terms of her imbibing. If Deleuze is so reluctant to accept that the sadist and the masochist are in a celestial entanglement, it rests surely in part on the most obvious of symmetries that refuses the specifics of each condition. When Deleuze says that the sadist would have no interest in someone who would wish to be submissive, no interest in a ‘masochistic’ need to be dominated, it lies in too easy a symmetry that looks ideal but is antithetical to it. The sadist wants resistance they destroy; the masochist wishes for a dominator they can generate a theatre with. It is a performance: a production, not a destruction.
If we generally accept that pornography destroys and the erotic produces, then we could say the psychologically sexual doesn’t assume the generic components of the sadistic or the masochistic as form, but as a negotiation the film explores. Babygirl may appear too straightforward next to Belle de Jour. Last Tango in Paris, Eyes Wide Shut, Crash, Intimacy and other works that offer this negotiation, but it does seem fair to claim it belongs to this category. Part of the problem with the exotic erotic and the pornographic is that they deliberately lack this negotiating factor, falling into the choreography of desire, a libidinous mise en scene, in the masochistic instance, into the gynaecologically specific and destructive, in the pornographic. It makes sense that one of the most famous of porn stars, Rocco Siffredi, would play Sade in a film directed by a filmmaker well-known both for his erotic dramas and his pornographic films, Joe D’Amato. But the work the actor developed on his own exemplifies this sadistic element, as he sought to dissolve mise-en-scene altogether. He became famous for what is called Gonzo porn, a genre that is known for the wobbliness of its camera, the indifference towards lighting, and the extremity of its sexual acts. Critics may be divided over what matters more — the form of the content in Gonzo— but for our purposes this dichotomy needn’t negate our argument. Giovanna Maina & Federico Zecca, looking at the different approaches to the ‘genre’, say, “many scholars and commentators identify the absence of narrative and the accent on extreme sexual acts as the main features of gonzo, thereby adopting a definition primarily based on content.” (‘Harder than Fiction: The Stylistic Model of Gonzo Pornography’)
But they state for other researchers, “the purest definition of gonzo is filmmaking in which the camerawork is a representation of the cameraman’s senses, and in which the camera is an acknowledged participant in the scene’. Such a reading is promoted by the adult industry itself, as is demonstrated by the description of gonzo included in the Review Guide of Adult Video News, one of its most influential trade journals: ‘Porno vérité, in which performers acknowledge the presence of the camera, frequently addressing viewers directly through it.” (Porn Studies) What is undeniable is that it sacrifices mise en scene to the most immediate of desires and the most varied of sexual acts. This has little indeed to do with Roland Barthes’ gaping garment, with the notion that the desire rests on the unveiling and the accoutrements of the fantasy. In his essay on ‘Striptease’, Barthes sees that the naked body is eroticised not chiefly in its nakedness but in the various items of clothing involved in the disrobing. “The furs, the fans, the gloves, the feathers, the fishnet stockings, in short the whole spectrum of adornment, constantly makes the living body return to the category of luxurious objects which surround man with a magical decor.” (Mythologies) It is as if in such a masquerade the biblical trumps the Freudian, with the clothes the beginning of original sin and striptease offering the items’ presence in eroticised form. When Barthes’ version of Eve is naked, she returns to a certain type of innocence as the voyeuristic dissipates into indifference. A sort of nothing to see here folks as the disrobed body promptly leaves the stage. As Barthes says, “It is only the time taken in shedding clothes which makes voyeurs of the public.” (Mythologies) If striptease is biblical, and finds its most obvious manifestation in the various interpretations of the Salome story, the further reaches of the pornographic propose that there is only something to see when the body is exposed.
Maina and Zecca make much of the body as a space of fluids and holes, places and spaces for penetration, one that allows for variety within the repetitive. In one, they note “two performers Keeani Lei and Steve Holmes alternate: ‘cunnilingus/masturbation, fellatio (“deep throat”), vaginal penetration, cunnilingus, fellatio (“deep throat”), vaginal penetration, anal penetration, ass licking, anal penetration, fellatio (“ass-to-mouth”), vaginal penetration, anal penetration/masturbation, fellatio (“ass-to-mouth”), anal penetration, cunnilingus, ass licking, anal penetration’, exactly in this order.” (Porn Studies). This is a plasticity a little different from what Freud had in mind when he reckoned that sexual instinctual impulses are “extraordinarily plastic[….]one of them can take the place of another, one of them can take over another’s intensity; if the satisfaction of one of them is frustrated by reality, the satisfaction of another can afford complete compensation.” (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis). Freud acknowledges this is possible “in spite of the primacy of the genitals”.
However, is Freud speaking as a Victorian man or as a Masochist, or as both, with Masoch himself a Victorian man, and is Barthes referencing no more than a sub-genre of the erotic, a branch of the masochistic, as the voyeur must wait out their desire and have it removed only in the moment of the nakedness they appear to be seeking? Yet Maina and Zecca also invoke Freud in the context of Gonzo: “This means that these (mostly oral and anal) practices could be considered ‘perverse’ in that they either extend pleasure beyond ‘those regions of the body conventionally designated as appropriate’ (i.e. genitals) or consist of ‘activities that may be proper’ if ultimately leading to vaginal penetration but instead remain as ends in themselves.” They would be perverse by Freud’s standards, but that isn’t the same as assuming they would be unpleasurable. At the sadistic end of the spectrum, they could seem very pleasurable indeed as they enter, so to speak, the gynaecological over the aesthetic realm. If Barthes can write of the disrobed body as the conclusion of the striptease, this is where the pornographic increasingly gets started.
One might just conclude this is a budgetary restraint meeting sexual restraint’s absence: the films are made for next to nothing, and the sexual performers reduced to nothing but their orifices. This gives a whole new meaning to the libidinal economy in the context of sexual filmic production. If masochism’s logic moves towards mise en scene and thus potentially to its ever greater elaboration, which allows us to speak about the exotic erotic, the pornographic and the sadistic move towards the absence of any form of what would usually be seen as sublimation or abstraction. Looking at the length of sex scenes and the intensity of the acts, Maina and Zecca note “the sexual performance thus becomes a sort of athletic tour de force, an extreme sport in which (especially female) performers are constantly pushing their boundaries and testing their physical resistance.” It is consistent with Paul Virilio’s claims about the extreme generally, as he sees little difference between extreme sports and extreme science, saying “‘extreme sports — those in which one deliberately risks one's life on the pretext of achieving a record performance.” Virilio adds: “‘extreme science’ - the science which runs the incalculable risk of the disappearance of all science. As the tragic phenomenon of a knowledge which has suddenly become cybernetic, this techno-science becomes, then, as a mass techno-culture, the agent not, as in the past, of the acceleration of history, but of the dizzying whirl of the acceleration of reality — and that to the detriment of all verisimilutude.” Virilio reckons, “as everyone knows, that which is excessive is insignificant. ‘Science without conscience is mere ruination of the soul. (Rabelais), and a techno-science without a consciousness of its impending end is, however unwittingly, merely a sport.” (The Information Bomb)
By analogy with Virilio’s formulation, and Rabelais’s remark, is the extreme sex practised in Gonzo, a ruination of the soul as well? That suggests a judgement that might not be useful, but it may be pertinent to think of the mindless and the mindful, with Gonzo porn seeking out the nerves at their most distended, through bodies at their most intensely exposed, against the big-budget erotic features that would offer a little nudity and some inexplicit physical entanglements, but devote most of their time to typical tourist pursuits: restaurants, massages, day tours, and the like. Emmanuelle was the template, released in 1974, but variations of it can be found not just in the numerous sequels; one can see them, too, in Vanessa, Madame Claude, Wild Orchid, Joy, and Joy and Joan. The films seek out erotic environments over explicit encounters, and while hardcore porn isn’t averse to fancy country houses and international travel in the work of Marc Dorcel and Pierre Woodman, for example, these are the exceptions rather than the pornographic rule, and still include the most graphic of scenes. The exotic flavour in these porn films suggests a budget but rarely proposes an aesthetic. Next to them, Vanessa, Madame Claude and others look dense with mise en scene and local flavour. Joy and Joan shows Brigitte Lahaie (famous for hardcore work, but here moonlighting as an erotic performer) working as a fashion model who flies to Singapore. In Vanessa, a girl raised in a convent discovers she is heir to a fortune, and takes off to Hong Kong, while in Emmanuelle, the title character jets off to Bangkok. Often, the characters are models, or wives of diplomats, or of men in business or finance. They don’t always go to East Asia; Latin America, the Caribbean, Turkey and Morocco are also likely destinations. Usually, medium or long-haul flights are required to bring out the notion that sex might be a primitive urge, though a moneyed pursuit. What matters is that the sexual is sublimated, and someone could do worse than claim pornography has the advantage over the erotic as class politics: anybody can afford to screw in most hardcore; only the elite have access to sex in the erotic drama. If Godard could claim all you needed was a girl and a gun to make a movie, Siffredi might say a girl and a penis.
But our purpose isn’t to wage class warfare in sexual cinema (though it is a useful avenue of exploration). It is, however, to propose that mise en scene lends itself well to masochism, and its absence can help define the sadistic. Godard’s claim may have been witty, but in the context of his own work, it was far from accurate. The texture of Godard’s mise-en-scene has been rich, though rarely been erotically focused, even if it has often incorporated the sexually provocative: Brigitte Bardot’s nudity in Le Mepris, the orgy in Slow Motion, a naked Mary in Hail Mary, and a couple of women disrobed in a gym admiring the torsos of bodybuilders in Aria. Yet a properly sexual cinema would activate the possibilities of sex in the property of the mise-en-scene, and this has been far more actively pursued by Walerian (The Beast, Immoral Women) Borowczyk and Tinto (All Ladies Do it, The Voyeur) Brass. Yet Borowwczyk and Brass remain chiefly eroticists, simplifying the psychology all the better to address narrative through lines of sexual pleasure. They are in very different ways good at what they do, but the sort of stratagems of desire we find in Kidman’s story in Eyes Wide Shut, the knee touching in Claire’s Knee, or Kidmann obeying her lover’s request to drink a glass of milk in Babygirl, suggest the importance of the psychological, along with the sexual, without indicating the insignificance of the latter.
While erotic films do often generate ambivalence in the characters over the desire they feel, it usually proves little more than a narrative conceit, all the better for the disrobing to begin and denouement to be arrived at. In Brass’s The Voyeur, the central character is a lecturer who can’t get over a dead mother and frets over an unfaithful wife. At the end, the wife returns to him. In The Story of O, the title character insists Sir Stephen should also be capable of the sexual sacrifices she has made. The stories frequently acknowledge the importance of premises and conclusions that the pornographic film need not entertain, where the premise is sexual congress and the conclusion a cumshot. But this is gossamer plotting, no matter the often relatively complex mise en scene. In the psychosexual film, the cogitations should be at least as layered as the visual design. Reijn reckons "For women, sexuality is complex.’’ “It takes longer for us to reach a climax. Our organs are built in a way that is a mystery, even to us, and I think our sexuality is very tied up in storytelling, the build-up to what is going on.” (Vogue Australia) Such a claim requires a combination of the visually elaborate and the psychosexually intricate, and while Reijn namecheck 9 1/2 weeks and Basic Instinct (she worked with Paul Verhoeven on Black Book), she also mentions The Piano Teacher, starring Isabelle Huppert (who also took the lead role in Verhoeven’s Elle). “We want to be Richard III, we don’t only want to play Lady Anne. And that’s something that Isabelle Huppert has tried to do all her career and it’s amazing that now there are more female writers and more female creators that can have fun exploring the dark sides of our personalities and part of the darkness must surely be sexuality.” (Sight and Sound)
This has nothing to do with sex being bad, or good; more that it is a distribution of nerves that has little truck with morality. When Romy tells her husband that she has never had an orgasm with him, where does the cruelty lie? If she is telling the truth, it is blunt, but the harshness is a biological fact she can no longer deny now that she has accessed that pleasure with her young lover. It is terrible because she has harboured this fact for many years, but how clearly has it been a fact to her? Her husband may have given her pleasure for years, but not orgasmic pleasure, and there she is trying hard to enjoy sex with this man she has built a life with over two decades and with whom she has two children. Is it possible she has forgotten the profound pleasure she once had with him, and that her lover is as readily reminding her body of what it has long forgotten? This seems unlikely but not impossible, and we don’t know for sure if she is lying to her husband when she tells him she has never orgasmed with him. When, at the end of the film, the lover is gone, and Romy is now having sex once again with her hubby, she orgasms in his company but not with him: she is thinking of Samuel when she comes. A cut shows he is clearly on her mind as the film uses editing to reveal subjectivity — common enough in the psychosexual film, and which sometimes forces us to call into question the very status of the image (flashback; fantasy, or projected jealousy into the future or in the past?) When Harford in Eyes Wide Shut thinks of his wife making love with the naval officer, this isn’t a flashback and hardly a fantasy, but it is the jealous imagining of a man who took his wife’s absent subjectivity for granted, and now allows her sexual thoughts to invade his own. In Belle de Jour, the film blends scenes that manage to propose the title character’s fantasies, but doesn’t always distinguish dreams, flashbacks and desires. As David Thomson said, invoking director Luis Bunuel’s surrealist past: ‘’It might be that the entire film is a dream – for surely it is the hope of all Surrealists that the whole of life might achieve the pregnant suspension of revery.’ (Movies of the Sixties)
What our brief examination of Romy’s sexual psyche tells us, and what our passing mention of Eyes Wide Shut and Belle de Jour reveals too, is that sex is at least partly in the head — and perhaps the ideal sexual cinema would be able to combine this aspect with the mise en scene evident in the erotic, and the undeniable nervous energy explored in films that can show explicitly its release through orgasm. This latter aspect wouldn’t necessarily be the raison d’être as it is in pornography, and porn films have become potentially pointlessly grotesque in their determination to show this release on screen. Whether it is bukake, with numerous men ejaculating on a woman’s face, or squirting, where a woman often releases liquid over the camera, the leading man or into mid-air, the positivist expectations of pornography become ever more specific in showing what constitutes pleasure. While the male cum shot has for decades been a vital component of porn, it is understandable that film would also wish to show female sexual desire manifest on screen. But as with the many men climaxing over a woman, squirting seems less about pleasure conveyed than evidence produced. In 70s pornography, the woman’s desire may or may not have been faked, but it was conveyed through writhing movements or apparent in the eyes. Yet with so many female porn stars wearing the thickest of false eyelashes, the eyes are no longer windows to the soul as the main source of the pleasure principle, but wary orbs worried where the cumshot will land. Some have used the term ‘cumbrellas’ to describe how faux lashes keep the cum out of a sex worker’s eyes. A false claim, by all accounts, but part of an ever-expanding vocabulary that is as acronymic as academia; as specific as a secret society. BBC for big black cock; MILF for Mothers I’d Like to Fuck, DP for double penetration; fluffer for the person who gets the porn star hard for the shoot; a pearl necklace to describe the design of a man’s ejaculate on a woman’s neck. Porn would be entitled to claim the vulgarities are not its own, but the consequences of Mother Nature. As both Freud and the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante have noted, the organs of pleasure were also those of evacuation. Laura Kipnis speaks of “nature’s weird decision to put the sex organs and elimination functions into the same ‘neighborhood,’ as Freud so charmingly puts it.” (‘How to Look at Pornography’) Cabrera Infante couldn’t avoid acknowledging that “sex takes place in the site of the excreta […] and the idea that sex meant entering a body in the places where foul things were trying to exit.” (Paris Review)
Pornography may well address the blunt truth about our bodies, but sexuality has always been more than that. Slavoj Zizek exemplifies this when speaking in a Swiss talk show about a scene in Brassed Off, where a young woman asks a gormless younger man if he would like to come up for a coffee. He says he doesn’t drink coffee, and she tells him she doesn’t have any. Zizek reckons this is a wonderful example of the erotically charged, as it reveals desire in negation. The absence of coffee makes clear the woman’s inclinations. But while pornography has grown enormously in recent decades, the exotic erotic and the psychosexual have all but disappeared. John Naughton notes that porn is worth at a “conservative estimate $15bn. That makes it bigger than not only Netflix ($11.7bn) but also Hollywood as a whole ($11.1bn) and Viacom ($13.3bn). In other words, online porn is huge.” (Guardian) That non-pornographic sexual cinema has shrunk is evident in the articles that crop up when a sexually-inclined drama is released. Esther Zuckerman looks at Anora, Babygirl and Challengers and a couple of others, and suggests that sex, once again appearing in narrative form, over its explicit manifestation, is worthy of an article. She makes clear that it had gone away, even if its comeback isn’t always so sexual. She says, “One complaint I’ve heard about Challengers is that while the movie has been hailed as sexy, there aren’t that many actual sex scenes. In fact, only once is it clear that intercourse happens.” But she adds, “I’d argue that the lack of full-blown sex scenes is intentional — the director, Luca Guadagnino again, saved the most intense erotic energy for the tennis court.” (New York Times) Yet this is like saying Hollywood in the 30s and 40s was full of sex because films would often cutaway to the fireplace. Articles like Zuckerman’s indicate not so much that sex is back, more that its absence has been so great that even a hint of its presence can be taken for the greenest of shoots.
Yet of them all, Babygirl seems the closest to one that constitutes a psychosexual cinema resembling the great works of cinematic sexuality stretching from the 60s to the early 2000s. Writing on films from this early period in Sexual Alienation in the Cinema (the book was published in 1972), Raymond Durgnat offers a chapter on French films of the sixties called “I Think, Therefore I Love’, and notes that, though seventy years of psychoanalysis has made us well aware of unconscious motives, this doesn’t mean we are any the more enlightened as a consequence. Yet it might make us at least aware of our un-enlightendedness, and allow for an escape from the readily rational, the sort of ready rationality we proposed when speaking of the work colleague who cannot see why Romy wouldn’t be up for an affair. After all, she is both compromised in her position at work and has already indulged in one fling; why not another? The colleague is rational and strategic, but unable to comprehend the mind of another who is working with greater sexual complexity. What Durgnat saw was that by the early ‘70s, certain tension points had become realisable. “The criticism is of vulgar Freudianism’, rather than the full potential of psychoanalysis. But in the context of the former, Sartre’s analysis of ‘bad faith’ as conscious choice, and R.D. Laing’s explorations of the role of ideology and adult routine as positive agents in the grade repression of originally conscious adult choices, mark a significant new venture…” (Sexual Alienation in the Cinema) It is this significant new venture Rohmer’s films (not just Claire’s Knee, but also La Collectionneuse, My Night at Maud’s, and Love in the Afternoon), no matter how chaste, helped explore.
His films did so alongside more explicit examinations in Belle de jour, Theorem and WR Mysteries of the Organism, and far more explicitly in Last Tango in Paris, Sweet Movie, and Ai No Corrida, as they all showed what might be going on in the minds of those whose sexual desires had been met with, or repressed by, social mores. When classic Hollywood cut to the fireplace, it wasn’t only a metaphoric claim about desires met, it also contained an assumption that the pleasures sought were so unhindered by oppressions and repressions, beyond what would constitute social norms, that there was no reason not to cut to the burning flame. In the sixties and seventies, it wasn’t just that censorship had weakened, nor even that metaphors became more formally complex. The cutaway we see in classic Hollywood is very distinct from one in a Godard film, where we might wonder what the connection is between one image and another, as the director wishes to provoke an idea rather than conform to a convention. But in psychosexual cinema, one reason why the cutaway to that fireplace would be absent rests on the likelihood that the sexual desire will not be matched by such a normalised metaphor that can stand in for it. Durgnat sees that we have moved away from “a tradition of conscious psychology (away from a shallow rationalist sense of purposeful motivation and benevolent self-interest, or a passive, motiveless stream of consciousness, or dependence on scientific method) into the vast and complex ‘zone’ between full consciousness and the unconscious proper.” (Sexual Alienation in Cinema) The sexual self may have always been complex, but the combination of the presence of cinema, its censorial weakening, the post-Freudian sexual landscape of the mind, and ideas from Sartre, Laing, Reich and Foucault, as well as Kinsey and Masters, allowed sex to be viewed as richly complex.
Yet how much of cinema has been equal to the task? And one says this well aware that the visual image has, over the last twenty-five years, increased greatly two areas that were no doubt under-represented on the screen. LGBTQ and trans-sexuality have been frequently narrativised in the 21st-century, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, in lesbian and gay films that are good, bad and indifferent. The good ones include Before I Forget, Stranger by the Lake, Blue is the Warmest Colour, Carol, Moonlight, Sebastian, Tangerine and Girl. More minority interests have been catered for through an internet that can attend to the most niche of markets, with the numerous forms of paraphilia, from an erotic interest in people with impaired mobility (abasiophilia), to arousal seeing yourself in the image of an animal (autozoophilia), from getting off on vomit (emitophilia), to getting turned on by flatulence (Eproctophilia). All are available through online content. In historic terms, access to sexually explicit materials by those with paraphilic disorders, if disorders they are, is a relatively recent phenomenon. “There are a wide variety of sexually explicit possibilities available via the Internet.” (‘Paraphilias and the Internet’)
This is all to the good and often no doubt sometimes to the bad: some forms of paraphilia are illegal, including cannibalism and Erotophonophilia, murdering for sexual pleasure. But most of this is far away from our concerns, and just because sexuality can be represented on screen in the most manifold of ways, one needn’t assume that the complexity of the sexual mind is explored as a consequence. Obviously, in some of the gay and lesbian films discussed above, it isn’t only that there are more films representationally about gay lives, these works offer them up with a texture missing from so many classic Hollywood examples from the past, with Hitchcock, no matter his mastery, hardly an innocent here. The two killers in Rope and the murderer in Strangers on a Train are implicitly homosexual, as if their murderous desires are somehow an offshoot of their gay inclinations, no matter if Rope was scripted by gay playwright Arthur Laurents. Our point holds, however: it isn’t the breadth of sexuality on screen that interests us, but the moment between the 1960s and the early 2000s when the complexity of sexuality as a combination of sociology, psychology, politics and desire coincided and produced a certain type of film we are calling the psychosexual, as well as hints of its presence in certain erotic exotic films and pornography. While Durgnat can rightly see in its development an affiliation between various subjects coming together to allow for a certain type of individual, more prosaically, we can say, during these years, there was a production infrastructure that allowed filmmakers usually to shuttle from the psychologically sexual to the exotic/erotic, and the exotic erotic to the pornographic. We have noted Joe D’Amato making erotic films, with Laura Gemser, for example, in Emmanuelle Around the World and Black Cobra Woman, but also numerous hardcore features. He was far from alone: Jess Franco made Vampyros Lesbos and Virgin Among the Living Dead as horrors segueing into the erotic, but also various stronger films too, and the same was true for Jean Rollin, who made Nude Vampire and Fascination before venturing into pornographic features.
It wouldn’t be the case that French erotic cinema was ruined by pornography, but when a Jean-Francois Davy pornographic documentary was released in the mid-seventies, it led to a proliferation of porn features so great that they represented almost half of France’s film output in 1978. Roy Armes notes: “157 out of 326 completed” were porn films that year. Armes might believe porn is “a genre that [is] in no way to be confused with the decorative provocation of Jaeckin or Borowzcyk” (French Cinema), but Franco and Rollin’s careers would seem to contradict such a statement. Yet it could be argued that porn cinema helped various eroticists make a general living, and it didn’t completely curtail their erotic outings, as they moved back and forth between porn films and the erotically focused. Sometimes an actor in a psychosexual cinema film would show up years later in erotic material, or vice versa. Christine Boisson was in Emmanuelle and then appeared in films by Robbe-Grillet and Antonioni. Patrick Bauchau, took the lead role in Eric Rohmer’s La Collectioneuse, and fifteen years later appeared in the softcore First Desires and Emmanuelle IV. Bauchau wasn’t just a jobbing actor. He was someone that the significant film theorist Peter (Signs and Meaning in Cinema) Wollen could say:” I was introduced to film in the first instance by people I knew at Oxford. Most important of all was Patrick Bauchau.” (From Cinephilia to Film Studies).
It was as if the sexual was in the environment, capable of incorporating a psychosexualism that could interest Luis Bunuel, (Belle de Jour) Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris), Miklos Jancso (Private Vices, Public Virt-es), Dusan Makavejev (Sweet Movie), Michelangelo Antonioni (Identification of a Woman), and Alain Robbe-Grillet (Progressive Slidings into Pleasure), alongside the erotic work already mentioned by Jaeckin, Franco and Rollin. There was sexual cinema in oppressive regimes right and left — Brazil had a far-right military government between 1964 and 1985, but near the end of it, numerous erotically-inflected films were released, and produced or distributed by the state-owned Embrafilmes. These included Sonia Braga movies, The Lady on the Bus, I Love You and Dona Flore and her Two Husbands, as well as Erotic Tales, Eros, God of Love and Beijo Na Boca. Meanwhile, Tito may have been ruling with that iron fist of his that he raised in defiance to Stalin’s dictates, but that didn’t mean within his controlling regime (albeit more liberalised than most Communist states), erotic films by Makavejev and (the Hungarian) Jancso couldn’t be made with Yugoslavian money. Eros could transcend Polis it seemed. If Durgnat could talk about the ideas that might produce a psychosexual cinema, it was no less propped up by production realities and government finances, no matter the various governments to be found in the 1970s and 1980s — communist, militaristic, or democratic.
It would appear to us that sex isn’t back, even if Babygirl possesses some of the qualities many might expect from sex-in-the-head cinema. There seems neither quite the industrial infrastructure for it, nor the Durgnatian nexus of influences that can turn it into a complex problematic. It perhaps rests partly on the commodification as opposed to the liberatory aspect of the sexual, as though much seventies cinema, including the pornographic, wanted the liberation of the self over the simple fact of sex selling. Let us not pretend there wouldn’t be hypocrisy in such claims and that the Larry Flynts of the world, who could win cases on the basis of First Amendment rights, weren’t doing so only for the noblest of reasons. Yet when looking at American porn films from the late seventies and early eighties, they had stories and actresses with bodies that didn’t look like they were made for porn — the sort of hyper-tanned, breast-augmented look that became popular a decade later. Veronica Hart, Leslie Bovee, Candida Royale were like people you could pass on the street, without looking as though they had something to sell, and gave sex an inner dimension, one suggesting that people had private lives and public lives, and they needn’t be one and the same. They could emanate intimacy without broadcasting sexuality. It was as if they hadn’t quite conquered shame but knew, too, it was a quality everyone possessed, because everyone had inner and outer lives that could make someone demure without being coy. But porn then took on more and more the quality close to Virilio’s claims, and arrived at extreme sexuality. This needn’t mean the sex was more graphic (though often it was); more that it wasn’t any longer contained by the shameful. It was revealed as the brazen. It became not about revealing oneself but coinciding with the market.
Increasingly dislocated from the nexus of psychosocial influences and with an infrastructure that had become exclusively pornographic, it became the enormous industry that we have addressed above. Just as drugs could be seen for a while within mini-expansionist possibilities explored by Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and others, now the names would be more likely Escobar and El Chapo Guzman, figures who seemed less interested in expanding their minds than their empires. These were hardly figures fighting materialism with spiritually enhanced substances; they just knew many wanted to augment capitalism’s pleasures and remove themselves from its stresses. A Vice article asks, “Are you still able to have fun at a party without taking that line or that pill?” You might only partake at the weekends and escape addiction in a strict sense, but you might not be able to see that it is part of a broader encompassing exploitation, rather than an escape from routine. It doesn’t do much to change reality; it merely allows someone to tolerate it. “Cocaine is so normalised now, we’re just going to see addiction problems among City professionals going up and up,” Paul Clarke notes. “During times of uncertainty and fear, people are anaesthetising themselves with cocaine. A lot of City workers have also come off the back of record bonuses and have been spending more on drugs.” (Financial News London)
This might seem like a digression, but it helps us locate the shifts in culture when sex and drugs are no longer part of new psychosocial possibilities, but are escapes from, or moneymaking opportunities in advanced capitalism. When we look back at the period that allowed sexual film to incorporate the exotic erotic, the psychosexual and a pornography that could still resemble aspects of a typical life, we see an era of sexual possibility that contained broader vistas than the immediately sexual. 1970s pornographic films were made on location, shooting in streets, bars and cafes, and not only studio backlots and disused airport bunkers. Peter Lehman may have taken Linda Williams to task, while at the same time admiring her famous book on porn, Hardcore, but if we change his emphasis, we can still yearn for a lost era. Lehman notes that Williams makes much of the narrative emphasis in porn films and saw a norm which was closer to an exception. As Lehman says, “ When discussing the hard-core feature that she dates from 1972 Williams, in my estimation[…] overemphasizes the function of narrative in the hard-core feature.” (’Revelations About Pornography’) Williams was seeing more similarities with non-porn cinema that a moment in it allowed her to see, but within the broader context of porn over further decades, this narrative focus, the use of locations etc., has proven exceptional rather than typical. When writing on a couple of porn memoirs, a writer at The Los Angeles Review of Books insists on distinguishing porno and porn: “two words that embody different eras — the more innocent seventies gets the extra "o," like a handlebar mustache, while the gym-hitting, harder-bodied, home-marketed eighties-and-beyond trims it off, so to speak.” Williams was writing chiefly about porno; Lehman absorbs it into what has become porn. In this sense, porno, whatever its limitations, its exploitative practices and its no doubt often chauvinistic attitudes, produced works that could be seen segueing, however clumsily, into the exotic/erotic and the psychosexual, in The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Lustful Feelings and Roommates in the US; Alpha films starring Dominique Saint Claire, Brigitte Lahaie and Marianne Aubert in France. The films explored desires; they didn’t simply show the bodily function of those desires in practise. They could be seen as part of the broader problematic concerning sex at the time, and are not without sociological significance, and modest aesthetic worth, as they show New York, Los Angeles and Paris, with the films shot on the streets, and offering the facades of apartment blocks and shops that existed. They possessed a milieu.
This is partly because they propose the masochistic not in the narrow sense of the contrast with the sadistic in that marriage made in hell or heaven according to taste, and that Deleuze resists, but in masochism as a mise en scene. Lehman may be right to see that porn has little general interest in plot and location as viewers fast forward and freeze frame the bits that arouse them, but who is to say exactly what in any work of sexual cinema will be likely to excite? Sure, statistically it is far more likely a viewer is going to get their rocks off watching On Golden Blondes over On Golden Pond, and the spectator more inclined to do so during the money shot than when the star is putting paper into the photocopier she will be soon be penetrated on top of, but that doesn’t mean all viewers will be excited in precisely the same way, at the same moment. Virilio quotes Kafka on cinema: “The cinema involves putting your eyes into uniform, when before they were naked.” (Art and Fear). We cannot resist the irony of seeing in porn cinema an eye put into uniform, no matter the gynaecological specifics at work. When a film trains itself so consistently on desire as various penetration and cum shots to the detriment of almost all else, sexual pleasure may seem to have been placed in uniform indeed, as the films offer a high degree of uniformity.
To understand something of the complexity of desire, and one we see at least alluded to in porno, the exotic erotic and certainly in psychosexual cinema, we might move from Kafka to another key modernist, Proust. Michael Wood says, “We don’t recall the past, he [Proust] says, until we stumble into a sensation, catch an old scent or the sight of an old glove. The old scent reminds us that life is beautiful, and we are enchanted; the old glove reminds us that we still love those who are dead, and we burst into tears.” (Proust: The Music of Memory) Proust insists that grief in this instance isn’t assertive, but allusive, and might we say the same of much that constitutes desire? It isn’t only in the specifics of the subject where desire resides, but also in the accoutrements of it, one that is greater than merely being reduced to the fetish. The fetish object is substitutional as Freud notes when saying of it, “there are some cases which are quite specially remarkable — those in which the normal sexual object is replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim.” (Freud on Sexuality) Instead, what we propose in the masochistic mise en scene is the potentialities of space that doesn’t draw a clear line between subject and object, seeing instead a combinatory sexualisation that cannot be reduced to a singularity. In our early examples of the psychosexually possible, we gave Babygirl and also Rohmer’s very modestly sexualised Claire’s Knee. Yet what they both show is not a fetish object, but the tension between objects and subjects that reveals the sexually possible. When in Babygirl, Samuel orders the glass of milk Romy drinks, it isn’t the milk that especially matters, whatever sexual metaphors a viewer might wish to draw between milk and sperm; it is more the circumstances in which she drinks it. There she is out with colleagues, and across the room is the man none of them she thinks knows is her lover, and he creates a moment of erotic force through this anomalous order. Not any drink would do; it needs to be contrary to what the evening demands, where people would be drinking wine or cocktails. Perhaps, Romy could turn milk into a fetish, but there is no suggestion she does, and what we can extract from the sequence is the broader mise en scene to which it fits. It isn’t so much that milk is a fetish object (or more specifically substance); instead, that many objects, substances etc. can be fetishised given the right conditions. However, the fetish wouldn’t simply be a psychological problem, but instead a sexual desire. Freud’s formulation reduces the sexual to the psychoanalytic, but what interests us more is the sexual less as an absolute object, but a contingent one — an object that comes out of the circumstances of someone’s immediate desires; not, for example, a problem located in one’s childhood. Claire’s Knee might hardly pass for the psychosexual, given Rohmer’s refusal to explore the explicit, but it encapsulates very well a structure of desire that is contingent on the moment (all the characters are holidaying near Lake Annecy), and of no great psychological consequence, even if subtly revealing of one’s psychology.
It offers, if you like, an aestheticisation of sexuality, and perhaps the problem with at least the heterosexual sex we have focused upon in the 21st century is that it has become associated not with liberation but commodity capitalism. It isn’t involved in a complex nexus that Durgnat so describes, but is close to transhumanism, taking into account the various operations that have become central to many porn stars’ careers. Whether it is women having butt extensions, breast enlargements or lip fillers, or men, ‘glandular penis enhancement’. The latest procedures for men resemble breast implants for women: “designed for cosmetic purposes only, it makes the man’s bone wider and longer, as opposed to the penile implant for erectile dysfunction that creates a boner on demand.” (AVN) Just as sports people seek opportunities to enhance their performance through the aid of the medical profession, so do many porn stars in the search for porn-star perfectionism, to conform to the audience’s expectation of what a porn star should look like. Virilio’s extreme sports and extreme sex meet in the doctor’s surgery. There was a moment when porno could be close cousins to the erotic exotic and the psychosexual, and all draw upon the aesthetic, whether that happens to be from literary texts or at least quoting them. Exotic erotic works like A Man for Sale end on a free translation of a Pessoa comment, while Borowzcyk adapted Ovid for The Art of Love. Radley Metzger’s porno The Opening of Misty Beethoven came from Pygmalion, with the director saying in his work, “I leaned very heavily on classic plot structures.” (Slant) Speaking of Camille 2000, he noted, “that story has been filmed close to 30 times in the history of film, as Camille and as La Traviata, which is based on the Dumas novel.” (Slant) When he says employed on the film the “best art director in the world, Enrico Sabbatini” — who worked on Christ Stopped at Evil, Giordano Bruno and Sacco and Vanzetti — Metzger makes clear the interconnections between mainstream film and the more sexually explicit.
Sabbatini’s services would hardly be required for Assman 27 and Buttman’s Ultimate Workout. It is the difference between commodification and concomitance, between a product that insistently relies on the graphic as an honest commercial sale, and the other that believes it has a commitment to a culture greater than a bang for your buck. Critics might insist with Babygirl and others, sex is back, but we are more inclined to see that it would take a lot more than a few Hollywood films, again exposing flesh on screen, no matter if Halina Reijn wants to combine this exposure of flesh with the exposure of a mind’s workings. It would take a combination of intellectual preoccupations and production infrastructures to return to a heyday of sexual cinema. In the sort of pun porn loves: a single swallow does not make a summer.
© Tony McKibbin