Reaction Shots: Sex Scenes, Lies and 2007
Plus the Noah Berlatsky Award for Terrible Take.
Girls Gone Wilde
The concept of the sex scene must be a massive moral crutch for… everyone. It’s not even an ideological thing, it’s more like that feeling you get once you walk into your parents… doing it. While I understand that to be the case, claiming that they don’t do much to advance or push forward the narrative structure is a bit off. It’s a matter of how it’s done, rather than what’s done. For some, it’s putting a barrier for actresses trapped under the leering gaze of a (typically male) director. For others, it’s unnecessary. Why watch people literally bare themselves, when you can go to Pornhub for that kind of content? (But don’t mention that some of the non-consensual stuff there is let off the hook).
This brings us to the cursed publicity surrounding Don’t Worry Darling, the second film by actress Olivia Wilde. Don’t Worry Darling, which judging from the trailer is basically the Stepford Wives made for girlbosses, hasn’t been released yet and it’s one of the few films that Warner Bros is heavily betting on, following their merger with Discovery. Wilde is pretty passionate about the project and you can tell from her profile at Variety. Particularly, that one scene in which Florence Pugh brings Harry Styles to the south of the border:
“Female pleasure, the best versions of it that you see nowadays, are in queer films,” Wilde says. “Why are we more comfortable with female pleasure when it’s two women on film? In hetero sex scenes in film, the focus on men as the recipients of pleasure is almost ubiquitous.”
But Florence Pugh has another opinion and it is diametrically opposite to Wilde’s. In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, she says that sex scenes shouldn’t really define her within the industry. There are two ways of interpreting her comments. The first is to presume that Pugh cannot stand the sight of Olivia Wilde, which is what every TMZ-styled rag assumed. The second, and this is the most charitable, is that Pugh doesn’t want this kind of scene, in general, to hinder any further career opportunities. Presuming that all possible safety is ensured and intimacy coordinators were there during production, let’s just say that this is a vibe.
But that’s not the only contentious issue facing Don’t Worry Darling. Wilde fired Shia LaBeouf, who was supposed to be the film’s leading man before Harry Styles. She presumed it was out of safety and artistic differences, as Labeouf is a prickly persona who has a penchant for intensity in his acting. He shot back, saying that he quit and shared a video of the director begging him to come back. Then there is the fact that this is also a vehicle for Harry Styles, one of the biggest pop stars in the world and who happens to be Wilde’s boyfriend. If this clip is any indication of what he’s going to be, then we’re counting on her.
If you want to know how I feel about Olivia Wilde as a director, I just want to let you know that the first fifteen minutes of Booksmart has to be one of the worst ways of beginning a feature film I’ve ever seen. With camerawork so shoddy and an unoriginal story to tell, It feels like that movie, with its shrill characters and politics is precisely designed to piss me off. But I want to give her the benefit of the doubt with this one, because Booksmart underperformed at the box office, and this may be her last chance to prove herself. But the surrounding hype is set so high, that all of these rumours would threaten to make or break it, and part of it is her proclaiming that it’s safe to watch sex scenes if she happens to be part of an underclass. If she doesn’t turn out to be the second coming of Elaine May, she might be the female version of Abdellatif Kechiche.
It came out in 2007 meme, Explained
Throwing out some superlatives for 2007 in cinema: the highest-grossing film (not adjusting for inflation) that year was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Rounding that out is a bunch of threequels for Shrek, Spider-Man and the Bourne Trilogy. It is also a fantastic year for movies that include, but are not limited to, There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Hot Fuzz, Zodiac, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Ratatouille. But one film has caught the eye of today’s cinemagoers and memers: Transformers. The ending of Michael Bay’s vehicle for… vehicles, went viral by being a template for other movies. There, the Autobots declare victory against the Decepticons; Optimus Prime makes a victory speech; then as the crescendo of Linkin Park’s What I’ve Done is reached, the film abruptly cuts to the end credits.
Gaze through social media, and the template of “it came out in 2007” to The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Arrival of a Train, Toy Story 3 and even No Country for Old Men with that moment arranged. You might find this the weirdest choice to reminisce about that particular year. Transformers is the most 2007 movie you’ll find and a pretty terrible one, even for a director as prolifically talented as Michael Bay. But why does this moment stick in so many people’s minds? I put it down mainly to nostalgia. I remember when the franchise was critically seen as an abomination of cinema that caters to the lowest common denominator with incomprehensible action, unlikeable characters and schizophrenic editing and poorly timed comedy. But it must be said that a lot of these people have a good time with these movies. They may not share my taste, but their experiences were unforgettable. The ending is not really a good template for the meme, because it was already applying a template seen in many movies before and after it came out. But if it’s unoriginal, I guess the pulling point is the song, because it’s what a lot of people remember as a good aspect in these movies.
You Must Watch This: Lust, Caution (2007)
Going back to the false idea that sex scenes are narratively useless, one movie that frankly debunks this is Lust, Caution, a spy thriller set in four years, in which a Chinese woman (Joan Chen) is involved with a group of students to assassinate a high-ranking agent (Tony Leung) in Shanghai’s puppet government led by Japanese imperialists, by honey trapping the guy. Following up on the masterful Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee takes a lot of familiar textures within Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema and turns the film into a class of its own. The movie is partly erotic, but when it goes there, it really commits with little restraint. Lust, Caution is the highest-grossing movie in the NC-17 genre, and you can see why it’s rated that way. There is an unsimulated sex scene that goes on for less than ten minutes, but it pushes the plot (no pun intended) forward and accomplishes the urgency more organically than you might expect. I remember when Margaret Pomeranz, a film reviewer for Australia’s At The Movies, says that this is a thriller made for women and you can see that there is a feminine quality that Ang Lee touches on. This movie shows that you don’t have to be a sleaze when it comes to sex scenes, but you don’t have to throw it out, when you are aware of what you are doing.
The Noah Berlatsky Award for Terrible Take
