It all started in the 1890s when some French dude with a boner ganked a Lumiere camera to film some zaftig demoiselle avec ses seins dehors. French people, of course, rule—they were too busy framing Alfred Dreyfus to give a fuck about some chick's boobs. In America, the first real big controversy about cinematic sexy time was when model Audrey Munson appeared fully nude in the film Inspiration in 1915. People freaked out: the enlightened because she was pretty hot—
—and the usual bluenose buzzkill limpdicks because “ZOMG SHE'S NAKED! WHAT WILL THE CHILDREN THINK?” (forgetting that kids would be like “oh, that lady isn't wearing clothes” and two seconds later completely lose interest and move on) But, there was fretting that if they banned Inspiration, Renaissance art would also have to be banned, so the censors let it slide (it even got a re-release in 1918). All prints, however, are lost, aside from stills:
As time went on, and cinema became more popular—and more of a money-maker—the morality brigade in America swung into action. Some ugly little fuck named Will Hays (left) was appointed the arbiter of what is and shall be in movies, and issued some pretty severe decrees (all those infamous ones like married couples in movies having to sleep in separate beds, no open-mouth kisses, no mention whatsoever of homosexuality or kink) that for a few years people just ignored.But, in the early 30s, the Czechs decided to troll. “We,” they said, “have this chick named Hedwig Keisler who goes by Hedy Lamarr.
“We made this movie where she has her boobs out. Enjoy, America!” And Hays blew a gasket. He knew that if people had the chance to see Hedy Lamarr's tits, open rebellion would ensue and he'd have sexually liberated villagers marching on his castle with torches and pitchforks etc etc. So Hays banned the fuckin shit out of Ecstasy. He let Hedy stay, because he may have been a tightass but he wasn't stupid. However, to make sure none of those perverts in Europe ever sent us prints of good-looking women with their boobs out, ever again, he decided to more strongly enforce his bullshit rules, which have entered cinema history lore under the informal appellation The Code.The Code lasted for a good 35 years, a period of time within which lay Hollywood's first Golden Age. In a really weird way the two are related: although movies had all those goofy tropes to profess their sexlessness, people found ways around the rules. Some who flaunted the rules got smacked: Howard Hughes hilariously made people's fuckin heads explode in the 40s when he made this picture where Jane Russell had a operating sex drive and her boobs were, let's say, not subtle. The picture got banned (see The Aviator for a funny dramatization wherein Leo DiCaprio argues fervently for the perspective of the boob).
Howard Hughes, of course, being shithouse crazy, lacked the subtlety to get around the prevailing prudery. One example of nifty circumvention that pops to mind is in The Maltese Falcon. In the book, when Joel Cairo shows up at Sam Spade's office, Effie walks in with stankface, hands Cairo's card to Spade and goes, “This guy is queer.” Tut tut, Effie, not very progressive of you, dear. In the movie, that exchange is awesome, because John Huston had to cut the word “queer” and rewrite the exchange. Thus, Movie Effie (who goddamn rules) walks in with a mischievous smile on her face, and hands the card to Bogart.
Effie: “Gardenia.”
Bogart: “In with him, darling.”
Both line readings drip with “Hey, he's gay. Let's say what's up to the gays in a really subtle way.” Also, in that movie, it could not be clearer that Bogart fucks the living shit out of Brigid O'Shaughnessy, even if they never say it out loud. Bogart does that intense, passionate Bogart thing, and Mary Astor gives him shiny-eyed “my God you're a funny-looking dude but there's something hot about you” all the livelong day.
The Maltese Falcon is a good transition into film noir, which is chock full of sex. Barbra Stanwyck in Double Indemnity for example, is sex. Fred MacMurray has a boner practically that whole picture. The whole genre is based on people confronting their suppressed darker side, making film noir about as explicit a reaction against the state of the Hollywood union as the creatives ever were able to articulate. Still, noir is very indirect. The trademark shadowy cinematography is not just a visual but a philosophical trope—the shadows are where it's at. And the sexuality is largely cloaked in those shadows too, but it's like being in a dark room and being able to sense something by physical proximity rather than sight.
Then Marilyn Monroe hit and everything went haywire. (Jane Russell had someone to make pictures with: see Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.) Since there was no way to be subtle about Marilyn's sexuality, a lot of previous repression got eased. It wasn't just her, society was going apeshit—Cold War hysteria, the gradually dawning consciousness of the Baby Boomers, the Negroes inventing rock 'n' roll to turn our daughters into nymphomaniacs—and at a certain point, people just went “fuck The Code.” This wasn't instantaneous Gomorrah, American movies were still pretty tame (with a few notable exceptions like Pretty Baby and, frankly, Lolita), but those rascally Europeans started sending Brigitte Bardot movies over here, and Anita Ekberg, and people like that. European movies had boob, and they'd been workin on things since Hedy (who although gorgeous, had normal-looking boobs . . . but then again Brigitte Bardot never did pioneering work in electrical engineering that led in fairly short order to the development of wireless communication technology the way Hedy did, and that's why Hedy will always be hotter).
Shit got real with Blow-Up though. Antonioni threw the fuck down: “I am having Vanessa Redgrave be topless. Wait, hold on, stop fapping, I'm not done. Oh, yeah. There's more. Dig it: Jane Birkin. Full frontal.” Boo ya. American kids saw that movie and said, “Hey, Jane Birkin might be kinda too skinny, but the days of people sleeping in separate beds are over.” The Boomers were all in college by this point, and college kids fuck. (The author did not fuck when he was in college, but that's another story. Todd Haynes, Paul Verhoeven, and a handful of individuals I shall not name due to the statute of limitations on unlicensed pharmaceutical distribution are to blame). So, in short order, American movies had nudity too.
The Europeans still had a leg up on us (so to speak), because even though there were a couple shots of full-frontal female nudity in Dirty Harry (to give one random example of how widespread things were so immediately, also the no-apparent-reason naked hippie chick in Vanishing Point the same year), the Euros were like, “you Americans . . . all such civilians when it comes to sex.” And we were like, “Fuck you talkin about, Bernardo?” And Bertolucci—the ambassador of Europe—was like, “Oh, foolish American, Nic Roeg and I are about to, how do you say, blow your motherfucking mind.”
So, 73. Last Tango in Paris drops. So does Don't Look Now. And yep, we were behind the curve. Marlon Brando fucked Maria Schneider in the ass with a stick of butter. And Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie (allegedly) totally Did It On Camera. Now, the former, sure, that was kind of creepy and weird, since no one really wanted to think of Marlon Brando as having a dick after about On The Waterfront (still, large parts of Last Tango in Paris were pretty hot, and it's beautifully filmed). But the latter, as little sense as large parts of Don't Look Now made, was still kind of awesome. I saw that movie in a room full of diehard film nerds in 1997, and that was the one scene where they all shut up about Nic Roeg's framing and non-linear editing, and if you know film nerds That Says Something.
America kind of threw up its hands after that, and after Wookies and Jedis stormed the castle nobody fucked anymore, and the most you usually saw in the 80s was tit at best in American movies. The defining sex scene of the 1980s was the Take My Breath Aaaaaawwwwwaaaaaaaaaay blue filter soft focus business in Top Gun: two gay people pretending to be hetero and managing to make sex look like calculus homework. (Okay, my basis for saying Tom Cruise is gay is half for dramatic effect and half based on those scurrilous rumors about him making the dudes he shtups sign non-disclosure agreements, which I can't prove, but my dad worked in the same bar as Kelly McGillis before she broke in the early 80s and he actually had to run interference once for her when she broke up with this kinda scary chick, so yeah). The 80s can kind of be summed up by sex, lies, and videotape, with James Spader unable to get it up normally, filming women talking about sex. That whole decade was just kind of off. Blue Velvet? Angel Heart? Something was in the water.
The dawn of the 90s saw a renewed—albeit brief—interest in dealing with sex on a more upfront level. The NC-17 rating was introduced to (theoretically) give mainstream movies more leeway in what they could show sexually, even if just about everything was still released as an R. In 1992, Basic Instinct came out, and while any pretense to that being the way people fuck is laughable, hey, they tried.
The Euro(ish) flipside that year was The Lover, based on Marguerite Duras' cryptic memoir about getting it on with a rich Chinese guy when she was a teenager. It's kind of boring when Jane March and Tony Leung Ka-Fai (aka the less famous Tony Leung) aren't having sex, which is a big problem for a lot of movies about sex as opposed to characters. But the sex scenes are something else. The two big sources of controversy were the (eventually) debunked rumor that Jane March was actually fifteen when they shot the scenes and the (never) debunked rumor that Jane March and Tony Leung were totally Doing It On Camera, the latter being one of the reasons everyone was so concerned about the former. Whether or not they were actually totally Doing It, they sure look like they are. The movie goes off the rails when they stop shtupping, and Jane March realizes she really loved Tony Leung and felt bad about treating him badly (snore), but the first hour or so is top notch, even if Jane March does look alarmingly young at points.
Speaking of Jane March, in the mid-90s there were a whole lot of really stupid movies with really fucking dumb sex scenes in them, and the first and worst was Color of Night. Color of Night is reeeeeeetaaaaaaarded. Jane March, to her credit, actually does look legal in it, and her performance is pretty underrated (hey, maybe I'm dumb, but I had no idea she played the brother too the first time I saw it, that actually was kind of surprising). But the movie itself was so stupid and her character(s) so ridiculous that her career evaporated completely. Then there was Sliver. And Showgirls. And Jade. Joe Eszterhas, the author of all three of those, deserves a lot of the blame for making movie sex so absurd and commercially toxic, but Color of Night was the worst offender. And so, the 90s, starting out so promisingly, ended with not only the NC-17 being a commercial kiss of death, but most studios toning down the sex to the point where it nearly everything coming out was PG-13.
The last decade, the first of the 21st century, whatever the hell we're supposed to call it (fuck The Aughts. I am not calling it The Aughts) was just fuckin bizarre. The Europeans raised the bar again by releasing a whole bunch of movies where they just abandoned all pretense and had actors actually fuck on camera. Intimacy (though there only the part where Kerry Fox blows Mark Rylance for a second was unsimulated, he never actually Put It In Her), Baise-Moi, 9 Songs, all those creepy Gaspar Noe and Catherine Breillat movies (though Catherine Breillat gets credit for having the stones to pass off Rocco Siffredi as an actor in a real movie). The thing is, none of those movies were any good, and no one in America saw them (well, ya know, except me . . . never say I never took one for the team, folks). A bunch of them even got banned in Europe, presumably for being shit rather than the Euros suddenly getting prudish. 9 Songs was almost interesting. The soundtrack was great, and Kieran O'Brien and Margot Stilley were certainly decorative, but her character was an annoying twat, he didn't even have a character, and there was no story except the sex scenes, kind of undermining Michael Winterbottom's rhetoric about making a “real” movie with real sex in it. Oh well.
Mainstream American movies were (and are) still pretty chaste. There have been a handful of movies that tried something new. Brokeback Mountain was kind of a big deal, even if it eventually became a punchline due to gay panic, and even though Heath Ledger apparently had as much problem with lube as he did with pills (too soon?) It still was two fairly high-profile actors playing gay, and it was a damn good movie.
On the smaller scale, there was John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, which was kind of scruffy, definitely indie, and deliberately not glamorous. Still, it Goes There in terms of content—gay, straight, other—and despite some clunky pacing and some actors definitely being around because they were willing to actually totally Do It On Camera rather than due to thespian talent, it's good-natured enough to be an enjoyable watch. Still, most of its goodwill points are due to being sex-positive and queer-positive rather than being an earth-shattering movie.
Nowadays, there's a perceived division of labor regarding sex in motion pictures. A lot of people are content to get all their sexual content from porn, and don't much care that mainstream movies perpetuate falsehoods almost as dumb as two married people sleeping in different beds, like women never taking their bras off during sex and underwear magically appearing post-coitus. Personally, I don't really give a shit. Porn is absurd (and if you try out stuff you learned from porn on an IRL partner you will not get a good reaction) but it certainly serves a purpose in society. “Real” movies aren't under any obligation to have sexual content, but it'd be nice if when they do, it's not total horseshit.
A lot of actors are terrified to be naked in a movie now because it'll end up on the internet, jumbled up with all the more outre “actual” pornography. That's too bad, but it's understandable, with society being what it is, and the fact that the American Right is so brilliantly media savvy that anytime there's even a rumor that something sexual is going to be in a movie they immediately throw a gigantic shitfit. This results in studios not wanting to go through the headache and actors not wanting to get death threats (and no, that's not hyperbole), so movies are neutered. For the most part. There's still independent cinema, and if those Europeans get their act together, there might be some hope for the future yet.
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