"Monkey Nipples"

From today's New York Times: the paper's great film critic Manohla Dargis comments on the disappearance of really good sex from contemporary American films. Well worth reading as context for the whole of this course.

The Closing of the American Erotic

By MANOHLA DARGIS
February 12, 2011


Lenny Bruce used to ask why it was obscene to show sex in American movies but not violence. Fifty years later, our screens remain washed in red, with severed if not necessarily naked body parts. More than half of the mostly American titles that received R ratings last year contained some kind of violence (as in strong, bloody and “grisly bloody violence and torture”) while only a third had sexual content. No NC-17 ratings were handed out, which bar youngsters, the viewers the studios most lust after.

American filmmakers shy away from sex, 
especially the hot, sweaty kind

One film did receive an NC-17 last year, if only fleetingly: “Blue Valentine,” a bruising independent drama about a marriage that goes south starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. The scarlet letters were for what was vaguely described as “explicit sexual content,” words interpreted to mean that the ratings board had freaked out at the realism or perhaps intimacy of the sex, including an instance of oral sex and another scene in which the unhappy couple make uncomfortable, crushingly sad love. The movie’s combative distributor, Harvey Weinstein, successfully appealed the NC-17, and the rating was changed, without cuts, to an R (for its “strong graphic sexual content, language and a beating.”)

When I saw the original version of “Blue Valentine” at the Sundance Film Festival last year (the film was subsequently trimmed before it was rated), I wasn’t shocked by the sex — after all, it’s about two lovely young people who can’t keep their hands off each other — but I was startled. American characters — heterosexuals! — were having sex in a movie. Even at this pre-eminent independent festival, American filmmakers shy away from sex, especially the hot, sweaty kind. The old production code might have crumbled in the 1960s and couples can now share a bed, but the demure fade to black and the prudish pan — coitus interruptus via a crackling fire and underwear strewn across the floor — endures.

“this genuinely vile and disgusting Swedish meatball is 
pseudo-pornography at its ugliest and least titillating.”

The recent deaths of the actresses Lena Nyman and Maria Schneider were poignant, useful reminders that there was a time when Americans used to troop in droves to go watch serious or serious-enough movies, domestic and imported, in which sex mattered as much if not more than violence. Ms. Nyman, a theater student turned screen siren, starred in the notorious 1969 Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow)” and its less popular sequel released three years later, “I Am Curious (Blue).” Ms. Schneider remains best known for holding her own, sometimes naked, against a more coy Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris,” the Bernardo Bertolucci landmark (and French-Italian coproduction) that forced audiences to regard butter in a new light much as Hitchcock’s “Psycho” had forced them to reconsider the shower.

After being banned and then cleared, “I Am Curious (Yellow)” opened to long lines and blockbuster business, reaping $5 million in six months. (Adjusted for inflation, that figure translates roughly into $35 million in today’s dollars.) The critics, professional and otherwise, staked out their turf: Writing for the defense in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it a “wise, serious, sometimes deadpannedly funny movie about the politics of life.” Opposed, Rex Reed fumed that “this genuinely vile and disgusting Swedish meatball is pseudo-pornography at its ugliest and least titillating.” Norman Mailer said it was “one of the most important pictures I have ever seen in my life.” Judith Crist just found it “pretentious.”

“This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made.” 

“I Am Curious (Yellow),” about a young woman (Ms. Nyman) investigating Swedish social and political mores, sometimes by pushing boundaries and making love al fresco, wasn’t the first sexually explicit movie to shake up American screens. In the 1950s and into the 1960s foreign-language stars like Brigitte Bardot, Hollywood directors like Otto Preminger and avant-garde filmmakers like Jack Smith did their part to ready the audience for the imminent sex-screen revolution. By the time “Last Tango in Paris” first played in New York in 1972, naked breasts and butts if not always penises had jiggled across screens and “porno chic” had turned Linda Lovelace into a household name. Forbidden topics, deeds and blue words had entered the mainstream: “Monkey nipples,” Richard Burton had announced in 1966 in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Seen now, “Last Tango in Paris” — which centers on strangers who become something else after having sex every which way in an empty apartment — scarcely seems the landmark it was heralded as, including by a breathless Pauline Kael: “This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made.” What’s striking about the film, beyond that it was an American (X-rated and then R) hit, beyond Brando’s beauty and Ms. Schneider’s too-tender youth, is its blissfully unselfconscious sexism, its celebration of maudlin masculinity and warmed-over crazy chick clichés. If Ms. Schneider holds her own against Brando it’s largely because she’s at times full-frontal naked. This cinematic revolution was, like so much of art, built on the bared backs — among other fetishized body parts — of women.

At last, a film with sex and romance, pretty boys
and no Jennifer Aniston. 

The movies still exploit female bodies, though today American actresses working in the commercial mainstream rarely strip down past their undies. If they tend not to bare it all it isn’t because of feminist progress. Neo-Puritanism and the mainstreaming of pornography have played a role, as have corporate blockbusters aimed at teenage boys, with their sexless superheroes and disposable pretty women smiling on the sidelines. Mind you, there isn’t much for women to smile about when it comes to American film, where for the past few decades, the biggest hits have starred men in stories about and for men. Though every so often there is something for us too; after all, women helped make a success of “Brokeback Mountain” a few years ago. At last, a film with sex and romance, pretty boys and no Jennifer Aniston.