SEX ON THE SCREEN: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?

Even though I write plenty about gender, I don’t write about sex because, being a Victorian at heart, I believe this is a very private matter. I don’t mean that sex should not be discussed (of course it should!), but that it is difficult to participate in the discussion because there is only a certain level up to which you may keep matters theoretical; personal experience defines sexuality and the other way round, and there are parts of my life I do not wish to share. That is the meaning of privacy, precisely.

An advantage I have is that I am heterosexual, which means I don’t have to defend my choices in the context of monogamous heteronormativity, though the advances of right-wing politics are indeed affecting the choices of heterosexuals as regards reproduction, contraception, and general sexual behaviour. I’ll end this introduction before I get carried away into matters which are not my focus today like the widespread reality of sexual abuse against children or the shocking case of Gisèle Pelicot. My focus, actually, is the representation of sex on the screen, so there we go.

I started watching last week the miniseries Los años nuevos by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Paula Fabra and Sara Cano. Its ten episodes narrate the relationship between Ana and Óscar, presenting them on New Years’ Eve along the ten years when they are a couple, 2015 to 2024, which happen to be their thirties. In fact, I don’t know for how long they are together, since I stopped watching after the first two episodes, out of excruciating boredom. I have not watched Normal People, the miniseries, but I have read Sally Rooney’s famous novel, and Ana and Óscar seemed to me an older version of Marianne and Connell, that kind of couple that, as you know from the very beginning, are made for each other, but put as many obstacles as they can in their relationship, which is really tiresome. My young students tell me this is how relationships work today, hence Rooney’s immense popularity, but I lose patience with what I can only see as rather silly dithering, excuse my prissiness.

That’s not my point, either. In the two episodes I watched of Los años nuevos Ana and Óscar have sex in very long scenes, as if Sorogoyen didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘ellipsis’. The sex is moderately explicit (you don’t see a vagina or an erect penis) but it is detailed, since Sorogoyen invites us to see each action in the couple’s intercourse, which appears to happen in real time. Watching Ana and Óscar I realized that sex scenes are all but disappearing from current cinema and series (or that I’m not watching films and series with sex scenes, I’m not sure).

These scenes made me feel uncomfortable, a voyeur rather than a spectator. The sex was exciting in its soft-porn rawness, but at the same time quite off-putting because of the director’s insistence in prolonging the scenes. I thought that I was projecting my own prejudices, as an aging woman not too keen on watching young bodies in bed and being reminded of her age. Yet, to my surprise, checking reviews in Filmaffinity, I saw that many other spectators had commented on the awkwardness of watching the same sex scenes. Enough is enough?

I read now and then articles about how the younger generations have less sex and are generally less interested in its onscreen representation, an impression that clashes with the generalized perception that young persons watch plenty of porn: the heterosexual boys to learn about sex regardless of how unrealistic it is, the heterosexual girls to learn how to please the boys when they ask for oral or anal sex… I don’t watch porn because I find it aesthetically unappealing, and because it tends to be misogynistic. I read now and then about specific stars or specific protests against porn, but generally its appeal baffles me. I wonder what’s it like to have a child choosing porn as their career, and whether the money compensates the actors for the sale of their privacy (supposing they do so freely). I assume it does.

This leads me to the actors who simulate sex on the screen. Watching Iria del Río (Ana) and Francesco Carril (Óscar) in their long sex scenes gave me time enough to start thinking about their jobs. I imagine an actor returning home to their partner, after a long day simulating sex with another actor, and I fail to understand how this works. As a spectator, instead of focusing on what’s going on between the characters, I see an enormous breach in the privacy of the actors’ lives, and the scene stops working for me.

Up to the 1950s, more or less, this problem did not exist. Actors might kiss passionately but need not take their clothes off; the image of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach in From Here to Eternity (1953) with their bodies being swept by the waves acting as metaphors of lust is a paradigm of that type of pre-nudity sex. I’m not going to trace a history of sex on the screen here and of the gradual collapse of the censorship codes but basically, between The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and Basic Instinct (1991), the last prejudices were abandoned and it became quite normal for actors to simulate full sex on the screen in both indie and mainstream movies.

When I was a little girl, I saw a photo of Sophia Loren and Richard Burton kissing passionately on the set of the 1974 version of Brief Encounter. The caption claimed this was a ‘fake kiss’. I was quite puzzled because I couldn’t understand why the obviously true kiss of the photo was said to be fake. Were the actors actually not touching? Was there a trick I was missing? I did not grasp then that the kiss was real, and the fakeness corresponded to the feelings, though we all know that the best movies are those in which the actors playing a romantic couple end up falling in love (Gattaca, with Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, has this magic for me, no matter that they are long divorced now).

Perhaps because of that fake kiss, I remain puzzled by what exactly happens in the sex scenes, like many other spectators. I know that actors’ genitals are covered by discreet, flesh-tone modesty garments, but even so, you see flesh touching flesh, tongues intertwining, hands caressing… Intimacy coordinators now make sure that every move is choreographed and the actors’ mutual discomfort minimized, yet, I still can’t imagine what kind of mental and physical havoc the sex scenes must play in the actors’ lives. I know that I could not stand seeing my partner in bed with another person on the screen for everyone to see, and I must wonder how actors’ partners cope with those scenes. Very professionally, I assume, though they are not necessarily part of the profession.

Apart from wondering what the actors in the sex scenes of Los años nuevos were feeling (or their partners), I also wonder what exactly this type of scene contributes. Famously, Bridget Jones said in the first novel of the series, in which she watches again and again the 1995 miniseries based on Pride and Prejudice, that nobody wants to see Elizabeth and Darcy in bed. That was the adaptation that contributed to the erotic imaginary the sight of Colin Firth in a wet white shirt clinging to his manly chest… better than any sex scene, really. These scenes, of course, can tell us whether the lovers treat each other with passion, tenderness, boredom, cruelty…but they cannot transmit how they feel inside (which literature can). Since spectators need to fill in that gap, I find that ellipses do the job much better. Have the actors kiss and undress each other, if you wish, but let me imagine what the characters do during sex.

There is a film that forced spectators and reviewers to face the question of sex but that failed for being too explicit. Does anyone remember Michael Winterbottom’s 2004 movie 9 Songs? Winterbottom, also the scriptwriter, narrates Matt and Lisa’s sexual relationship; the nine songs are played by the eight different rock bands whose concerts they attend together from the night they meet until they split. Actors Kieran O’Brien and Margo Stilley (then not yet a professional) had unsimulated, real sex, which means that technically this is a porn film, with the difference that Winterbottom’s main aim was not to titillate but to narrate sex. As he said at the time of the film’s release, “Books deal explicitly with sex, as they do with any other subject. Cinema has been extremely conservative and prudish. I wanted to go to the opposite extreme and show a relationship only through sex.” Opinions were divided, with some reviewers and spectators finding the sex unerotic and tedious, while Derek Malcolm of The Guardian praised it: “Nine Songs looks like a porn movie, but it feels like a love story. The sex is used as a metaphor for the rest of the couple’s relationship. And it is shot with Winterbottom’s customary sensitivity.”

Winterbottom stressed that “the point of making the film was to say, ‘What’s wrong with showing sex?’” Watching his film twenty years ago I found it very honest and straightforward. I did wonder then about the actors’ privacy, but their choices were so extreme that I assumed they were fine. The difference between 9 Songs and, to continue with the same example, Los años nuevos, is that Winterbottom’s film deals directly with sex while Sorogoyen’s series deals with romance. In a relationship there are many other elements apart from sex but they rarely appear in romantic stories, from disagreements over domestic chores to intense conversations about, well, movies. The problem, then, is possibly the disproportion. If you use lots of screen time for sex, and this is not a porn movie or series, then you need to balance that with other elements that explain why the characters love each other. In the absence of good dialogue, which is what kept romance going before sex started being narrated in print and on the screen, the narrative quickly becomes boring. Either it seems that the couple are only in it for the sex, or their story seems too ordinary to engage the spectator’s attention, which is what happened to me with Sorogoyen’s Ana and Óscar. Why should I care for them?

Perhaps it’s time I listen to my students’ recommendations and start reading romantasy, they tell me this is were good, sassy romance can be found. We’ll see when they start making the corresponding adaptations…