Sex is disappearing from the big screen, and it’s making

movies less pleasurable

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Graphic sex is a longtime staple at Cannes, where in 2003 director Vincent Gallo
outraged audiences with a scene of him receiving oral sex from Chloë Sevigny in “The
Brown Bunny,” and where 10 years later viewers were confronted with the sight of
several male members in various degrees of tumescence in “Stranger by the Lake,”
followed by a 17-minute sex scene in Kechiche’s lesbian coming-of-age story “Blue Is the
Warmest Color.”

The actresses in “Blue Is the Warmest Color” intimated that they felt poorly treated by
Kechiche on the set of that film. This year, he faced accusations that he plied his young
“Intermezzo” actors with alcohol until they engaged in real-life sex acts for the camera.
Meanwhile, as that controversy played out on the Riviera, U.S. audiences were flocking to
see “John Wick 3,” in between making “Avengers: Endgame” and “Aladdin” huge hits. One
of them a dark, fetishistically violent thriller, one a live-action comic book, one a Disney
fairy tale, all resolutely sex-free.

Thus does a familiar pattern repeat itself: The summer begins with a new crop of
sexually explicit, mostly European movies set off from Cannes to the festival circuit and
eventually to brief art-house runs, while Hollywood churns out its chief export of gun-
happy escapism and wholesome kid stuff. Between those two channels the classic sex
scene — once a staple of high-gloss, adult-oriented, mainstream movies — has been
largely forgotten and ignored, recommitted to very esoteric margins it sprang from
generations ago.

Sex has always been a part of American cinema: Ninety years ago, Louise Brooks
scandalized audiences with her brazen, exhilaratingly unabashed eroticism in the silent
classic “Pandora’s Box.” In the late 1920s and early 1930s, before the enforcement of the
censorious Hays Code, film studios competed over whose movies could be the most
daring, and delighted in sneaking naughty material past local decency boards.

Although the Golden Age of Hollywood — during which the industry censored itself by
way of the Production Code — produced some deliciously provocative innuendo and
ingenious workarounds, it wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s, when American audiences
were able to see new, explicit films from postwar Europe, that sex became not just
titillating but downright respectable: Such films as “And God Created Woman” and “Belle
de Jour” introduced a new formal convention to discerning cineastes who could couch
their more prurient instincts in terms of liberated expression, highbrow sensuality and
uncompromising realism. Of course, even the artiest imports were canny enough to have
it both ways: 1972’s “The Last Tango in Paris” was just one example of what could be

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gained from cultural importance conferred by critics while enjoying the free publicity
garnered by its most scandalous content — in this case, a scene of Marlon Brando
sodomizing co-star Maria Schneider with a stick of butter.

But those films proved germinal for a generation of filmmakers whose cinematic ideals
were shaped during that era, and who then took its most outré sensibilities to
Hollywood, where they softened their most transgressive edges. The 1980s and early
1990s were a heyday of sex scenes that might have been hot and heavy but stayed within
the parameters of bourgeois good taste: Movies such as “An Officer and a Gentleman,”
“Body Heat,” “9½ Weeks,” “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct” were must-see films, not
just because of their twisty plots but because of sex scenes that were frank, artfully
staged and, sometimes, arousing in their own right.

Arguably, seduction and suggestion are almost always sexier in movies than the act itself
— witness Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman’s prolonged kiss in “Notorious” or Kevin
Costner painting Susan Sarandon’s toenails in “Bull Durham.” But when a sex scene
works — when it exists for more authentic reasons than shock value or sophomoric
giggles and manages to involve viewers more deeply than mere voyeurism — it
exemplifies one of those rare things that movies do best. Well-conceived sex scenes are
capable of producing a spontaneous physical frisson just as cathartic — and gratifying —
as a sudden belly-laugh or a good cry. As the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted,
movie sex “is the ultimate special effect.”

And now, it’s pretty much gone.

We know why. With the onset of Internet porn, viewers looking for vicarious thrills had
instant access to a cheap, private universe of polymorphous gratification. While
Hollywood embraced a business model centered around wholesome baby-boomer
nostalgia and PG-13 franchises, cable television and streaming services found their own
niche, engaging in “Game of Thrones”-like one-up-manship in violence, profanity — and
sex. Movies such as “Brokeback Mountain” and “Milk,” which broke ground in
representing gay protagonists, shied away from depicting the most intimate mechanics
of men having sex, to the consternation of viewers who wanted to see their sexuality
represented and normalized. But that form of re-closeting was of a piece with an era in
which, when sexual activity was portrayed at all, it was seen as a matter of compulsion
and anxiety (as in Steve McQueen’s “Shame”) or played for adolescent laughs (as in the
Apatovian deflowerment comedies).

Today, whether it’s in “Long Shot” or “Rocketman,” the sex scene has been reduced to a
shorthand, an instantly recognizable grammar that begins with some jokey or flirtatious
foreplay, cuts to some flesh (tasteful enough to honor the actors’ no-nudity clauses), then
discreetly cuts away when things get real. You know what happens next , the camera
seems to tell us. Do you really want me to spell it out for you?

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Well, yes. When you deprive audiences of a really good sex scene, you’re depriving us of
what was once one of the greatest enjoyments of going to the movies, a part of classic
cinematic grammar that, when choreographed with sensuality and sensitivity, can be
memorable as genuine entertainment — maybe even great art — and not just a
lascivious clip on Pornhub.

What’s more, you’re pretending to build a world grounded in realism that is completely
devoid of one of the core elements — and joys — of the human experience. It’s as if
Hollywood — fixated on families, teenagers and global markets — has given up on
American adults as anything more than arrested adolescents interested only in revisiting
the distractions of their youth.

In many ways, the skittishness reflects a culture that has found its own good reasons to
turn away from sex in movies, or at least look at it askance. Thirty years ago, the AIDS
epidemic made heated, heedless sex in movies not just irresponsible but unrealistic; in
the wake of the #MeToo movement, what viewers once reflexively accepted as sexy is
being reappraised within the context of a “male gaze” in cinema, in which women are
portrayed as objects, stripped of agency and reduced to mere vessels for men’s wish
fulfillment.

What’s more, audiences are now far more attuned to how life and art can’t be separated:
Stories of Maria Schneider feeling manipulated and misused on the set of “Last Tango,”
or Kechiche’s actresses expressing similar misgivings about how they were treated in
“Blue Is the Warmest Color,” force the discomfiting realization that, all too often, our
visual pleasure has been generated by means of an exploitative and dehumanizing
production process. (Writing about Kechiche’s leering camera in “Mektoub, My Love:
Intermezzo,” as well as the possibilities that the performances were coerced, the critic
Caroline Tsai called the movie “a human rights violation.”)

That leaves an entire cohort of filmgoers sorting out how our tastes have been formed
and deformed by movies that presented desire from an overwhelmingly male,
heteronormative point of view, and how we reconcile that problematic lens with images
we still find . . . kind of hot. If the lustful, aggressive, emotionally complex staircase scene
in “A History of Violence” is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

To be sure, there’s precious little to mourn in the death of the kind of ogling soft-core
wish-fulfillment fantasies that male directors foisted on viewers for nearly a century. But
is abstinence really our only option? With young filmmakers being co-opted by the
Disney-Marvel complex, and with millennials and Generation Z reportedly having less sex
than their predecessors, the new chastity on screen feels like a prudent but not entirely
welcome new normal.

And it’s not like artists are incapable of getting sex right: Productions are now hiring
“intimacy coordinators” to make sure sex scenes are being choreographed and staged
with appropriate respect for physical boundaries and psychological well-being. Movies
here and there have managed to suggest a way forward: Witness Alfonso Cuarón’s
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tenderly seductive love triangle in “Y Tu Mamá También” and Angela Robinson’s warm,
deeply humanistic portrayal of polyamorous sex play in “Professor Marston and the
Wonder Women,” or Meg Ryan’s satisfaction at the hands (and other things) of Mark
Ruffalo in Jane Campion’s feminist urban thriller “In the Cut.” Even “Fifty Shades of Grey”
offered a potentially fruitful new grammar making consent a stimulating part of foreplay
rather than an instant buzzkill.

With luck, a new generation of writers, directors and actors — steeped in a non-binary,
anti-shaming sexual culture — is poised to reclaim sex as a crucial element of
mainstream style. Meanwhile, as studios who employ them try to figure out how to
compete with peak TV and ever-multiplying streaming outlets, they might want to
remember their own history: Spectacles and jump scares get people into theaters, but so
does a good old-fashioned snog. It’s not that we’re turned off from going to the movies.
It’s that the movies have stopped turning us on.

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