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It got that much 25 or 30 years ago, when sexuality was a subject that attracted serious moviemakers and moviegoers. The X-rated Midnight Cowboy won the top Oscar for 1969. Directors like Sam Peckinpah (Straw Dogs) and Ken Russell (The Devils) nudged movie eroticism down the dark alley of the libido. Columbia Pictures released the sexy French film Emmanuelle and made a bundle. Grard Depardieu exposed his erect manhood, then apparently cut it off, in The Last Woman. There was another graphic emasculation in Japanese director Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses (Ai No Corrida), where passion and craft raised hard-core porn to obsessive art.
Still, the mass audience wanted to see a movie star bare all. Marlon Brando obliged in Last Tango in Paris, pouring out his heart and his lust. Back then the erotic accessory was butter, not hair gel, and its application was an adventure, not a joke. For a while there was the hope or threat of a sexually liberated cinema, with the newly mature commercial films and the newly legalized porn films (which also had certain artistic intentions) meeting each other half way. Americans had to be 18 to see Last Tango, back when X wasn't a dirty letter. But so what? A good sexy movie should be worth waiting for, like your dad's car keys or a legal bottle of beer.
Then the kids took over the box office. Having discovered this huge young market, the moguls wanted every dollar they could squeeze from it. Sex movies were now almost exclusively pornographic--artless and largely passionless. Sexual flirtation was to be found mainly in horror movies, where it was punished with the slash of a serial killer's knife. The new hot hands were directors (Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese) who had little interest in portraying sexual romance. They and their imitators learned how to eroticize violence, forgot how to dramatize eroticism; they paid more attention to the cocked gun than the gunned cock. Eros died.
In other countries it still lives. Japan reveals the erotic impulse in intense, eccentric fashion in live-action films and dozens of anime each year. In Hong Kong, Hsu Chi, an ornament of Category III sex dramas, could win an armful of acting trophies, co-star in a Jackie Chan movie and finally turn down a lead role in Ang Lee's Chinese epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--because she was just too busy!
Within the past year, France has produced several pedigreed films with sex scenes that were hard-core or nearly that. Los Carax's Pola X was rated U (all ages allowed), though it features a makeout scene in which Guillaume Depardieu, Grard's son, upholds the family tradition by sporting an engorged penis. But France is ooh-la-la. America is ewww-gross!
At the start of this story, we lured you with alluring images, a little pornucopia, from Eyes Wide Shut. Now you probably expect us to deliver news of the Big Sex Scenes. Well, we can't, because there aren't any; the whole film is an elaborate tease. It's all proposition and no payoff. Of course, as in every Kubrick film, this is the director's intention, not his failing. The story is about titillation without consummation; the film offers just that.
Most Kubrick movies are set in the past or future. And though Eyes Wide Shut is nominally contemporary, its heart and other organs are in the past. What was the last movie with an aging Hungarian gigolo? A musician who plays blindfolded while his employers have sex? The orgy scene, with its elegantly clothed men and elegantly nude women, echoes the '60s photographs of Helmut Newton, who made the sex ritual both naughty and chic.
But the film's true period is the '50s: this is a dead-serious version of a Broadway sex comedy like The Seven Year Itch or The Marriage-Go-Round. A comfortable, married Manhattanite is beset by a series of attractive women, tall and light-haired like his wife, who flirt boldly with him, or are naked in his presence; the plot turns on whether he will surrender to the temptation or resist it. The password into the orgy is "Fidelio," and the secret word for the film is fidelity. Can a man be faithful to his wife if he only wants to play around? How great a sin is coveting?
Movies are all about coveting, about watching something desirable. Here we watch Cruise watch women, be drawn to them, then allow scruple or circumstance to puncture the flirtation. Kubrick's desire was for us to be as fascinated and troubled--and, why not?, aroused--by what Cruise sees as he is. When Eyes Wide Shut works, the corpse of Eros sits up, erect again, looking out and into the moviegoer.
If the film had been a big hit, it could have helped American directors recall what makes all of us tick, and tingle, and hurt, and come back for more. We might even have seen the full-frontal revelation of two souls abrading in the night. But after a sturdy opening weekend at the box office, Eyes closed shut; even Tom Cruise could not sell a serious erotic drama. U.S. moviegoers failed the test, condemning them--and the rest of the world--to an American cinema of violent thrills and laughs, without a little grown-up sex.
must be accompanied by a parent or guardian) get that tag for lurid violence and language. If there's a bosom on display, it's usually either as a gag (the prosthetic dugs in There's Something About Mary) or a lure to humiliation (the strip-teasing coed who coaxes two premature ejaculations from a teenager in American Pie). Nothing erotic here--just the use of flesh as a tool of degradation. In the typical American movie, sex is violence. Stanley Kubrick knew a few things: that sex, and the longing for it, can be brutal, but in subtler ways; that, no matter how active we are, we think about sex more than we engage in it; that sex is what happens not between our legs but between our ears. And, since nobody else was making films about this dreamy erotic impulse, he did. That made the release of Kubrick's final film an important test case. It raised early hopes that the phrase "adult entertainment" could be rescued from the porno industry and refer, as it once did, to stories about grownups for grownups. The benighted Hollywood rating system had already flunked the test by demanding changes in a few mild scenes during a very stately orgy. Now it was the American audience's turn. Could moviegoers be enticed and enlightened by the glow of erotic intensity? Would they sit still for a slowly unfolding tale of would-be passion? This is not a parochial matter. Hollywood makes the movies the world sees. If Eyes Wide Shut cashed in at the domestic box office, the moguls--born followers and trend groupies all--would make more films, perhaps better, hotter, deeper ones, about two things a lot of people still do: have sex and get disturbed about it. But first, American audiences have to grow up. They must not be embarrassed by, and thus dismissive of, the sexual impulse when it's shown on the big screen. That seriousness is hard to find, now that American moviegoing is essentially an infantile experience. We convene in a big, dark room and laugh at what shocks us. Ooh, look! that truck/guy/world just blew up! Yaaay! To expect people keyed to the juice of cartoonish carnage to get a thrill or shiver from a couple of actors in an intimate embrace is like asking a kid to give up his Pokemon for a volume of love sonnets. No wonder that, in the U.S., the consumption of movie eroticism has become solitary. Porn theaters have given way to triple-X videos, lap dancing to laptops. But sex is too important to be left to the sex-film industry. Lovemaking and its attendant anxieties constitute a powerful experience, the most convulsive emotional and physical drama in most people's lives. And it warrants as much artful attention from our top film auteurs as space operas or teen revenge fantasies. It got that much 25 or 30 years ago, when sexuality was a subject that attracted serious moviemakers and moviegoers. The X-rated Midnight Cowboy won the top Oscar for 1969. Directors like Sam Peckinpah (Straw Dogs) and Ken Russell (The Devils) nudged movie eroticism down the dark alley of the libido. Columbia Pictures released the sexy French film Emmanuelle and made a bundle. Grard Depardieu exposed his erect manhood, then apparently cut it off, in The Last Woman. There was another graphic emasculation in Japanese director Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses (Ai No Corrida), where passion and craft raised hard-core porn to obsessive art. Still, the mass audience wanted to see a movie star bare all. Marlon Brando obliged in Last Tango in Paris, pouring out his heart and his lust. Back then the erotic accessory was butter, not hair gel, and its application was an adventure, not a joke. For a while there was the hope or threat of a sexually liberated cinema, with the newly mature commercial films and the newly legalized porn films (which also had certain artistic intentions) meeting each other half way. Americans had to be 18 to see Last Tango, back when X wasn't a dirty letter. But so what? A good sexy movie should be worth waiting for, like your dad's car keys or a legal bottle of beer. Then the kids took over the box office. Having discovered this huge young market, the moguls wanted every dollar they could squeeze from it. Sex movies were now almost exclusively pornographic--artless and largely passionless. Sexual flirtation was to be found mainly in horror movies, where it was punished with the slash of a serial killer's knife. The new hot hands were directors (Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese) who had little interest in portraying sexual romance. They and their imitators learned how to eroticize violence, forgot how to dramatize eroticism; they paid more attention to the cocked gun than the gunned cock. Eros died. In other countries it still lives. Japan reveals the erotic impulse in intense, eccentric fashion in live-action films and dozens of anime each year. In Hong Kong, Hsu Chi, an ornament of Category III sex dramas, could win an armful of acting trophies, co-star in a Jackie Chan movie and finally turn down a lead role in Ang Lee's Chinese epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--because she was just too busy! Within the past year, France has produced several pedigreed films with sex scenes that were hard-core or nearly that. Los Carax's Pola X was rated U (all ages allowed), though it features a makeout scene in which Guillaume Depardieu, Grard's son, upholds the family tradition by sporting an engorged penis. But France is ooh-la-la. America is ewww-gross! At the start of this story, we lured you with alluring images, a little pornucopia, from Eyes Wide Shut. Now you probably expect us to deliver news of the Big Sex Scenes. Well, we can't, because there aren't any; the whole film is an elaborate tease. It's all proposition and no payoff. Of course, as in every Kubrick film, this is the director's intention, not his failing. The story is about titillation without consummation; the film offers just that. Most Kubrick movies are set in the past or future. And though Eyes Wide Shut is nominally contemporary, its heart and other organs are in the past. What was the last movie with an aging Hungarian gigolo? A musician who plays blindfolded while his employers have sex? The orgy scene, with its elegantly clothed men and elegantly nude women, echoes the '60s photographs of Helmut Newton, who made the sex ritual both naughty and chic. But the film's true period is the '50s: this is a dead-serious version of a Broadway sex comedy like The Seven Year Itch or The Marriage-Go-Round. A comfortable, married Manhattanite is beset by a series of attractive women, tall and light-haired like his wife, who flirt boldly with him, or are naked in his presence; the plot turns on whether he will surrender to the temptation or resist it. The password into the orgy is "Fidelio," and the secret word for the film is fidelity. Can a man be faithful to his wife if he only wants to play around? How great a sin is coveting? Movies are all about coveting, about watching something desirable. Here we watch Cruise watch women, be drawn to them, then allow scruple or circumstance to puncture the flirtation. Kubrick's desire was for us to be as fascinated and troubled--and, why not?, aroused--by what Cruise sees as he is. When Eyes Wide Shut works, the corpse of Eros sits up, erect again, looking out and into the moviegoer. If the film had been a big hit, it could have helped American directors recall what makes all of us tick, and tingle, and hurt, and come back for more. We might even have seen the full-frontal revelation of two souls abrading in the night. But after a sturdy opening weekend at the box office, Eyes closed shut; even Tom Cruise could not sell a serious erotic drama. U.S. moviegoers failed the test, condemning them--and the rest of the world--to an American cinema of violent thrills and laughs, without a little grown-up sex.