Sep. 10, 2008 - Issue #673: Sex in the City 2008

Sexuality on film

21st century film men are coming face to face with sexual mortality

Sex in the movies has revolved around men and their lustful gaze for a long time. That look of lust has popped up in both complex, disturbing ways—the eye spying on a naked Vivien Leigh before spiralling us, suddenly accomplices, into the drain of murder—and simply exploitative ways. In the ’90s, with titles alone—Basic Instinct, Indecent Proposal—Hollywood was promising some cheap titillation for the cool, hard male stare. A pseudo-noir about a supposed bisexual? A rich guy looking to help a down-on-their-luck couple? The plots were really just fumbling foreplay for sharing out Sharon Stone (who, some accounts have it, was harassed by director Verhoeven into uncrossing her legs in that infamous scene), or displaying Demi-nude Moore. And then, just as the Internet was realizing its porn potential, along came Striptease, its title assuring any oglers of Moore’s first dip into the skinny, soon to be archived on countless nude-scene databases.
 

Now, in this decade—the naughty noughts, exemplified by the Age of Apatow—there’s been a strange kind of infantile regression. It’s as if the filmmakers weaned on those database clips of movie nudity are obsessed with that confused, not-quite-teenager male stare they had in the ’90s. It’s all there in the titles, too. The Forty-Year-Old-Virgin is about a guy too spluttering and uptight to just get laid already—no surprise when he’s surrounded by porno tapes as if they’re just toys for boys. And, voice still cracking, the maturity level in Superbad screeches into its natural pre-pube pitch when one of the teens freaks out at some menstrual blood—he may as well scream, “What? Their yazoos are for something other than my ding-dong?” (Yeah, like birth, as Apatow shows in his freak-out-at-pregnancy film Knocked Up.)
 

But there have been some half-dramas, half-comedies that show a genuinely poignant, frail male sexuality borne of an adolescent-awkward, adult-pathetic and generally unsure groping for actual human connection. Credit the Coen Brothers and Alexander Payne for casting a cock-eyed look at middle-aged lust, getting us to laugh, a little uncomfortably, at a kind of sexistentialism through nudity: Hamlet meets The Full Monty.

 

Like the dog that didn’t bark in the nighttime in the Sherlock Holmes story, the interesting thing about sex in the Coen canon is that it’s not really there. There’s no action between sheets because snappy conversation replaces foreplay and the tangled plot of life unravels after sex: stealing a baby in Raising Arizona because HI’s “seed could find no purchase” in Ed or a pregnant police chief just doing her job in Fargo.
 

The Big Lebowski offers the best example of a mid-lifer overwhelmed and befuddled by sex. “The Dude” (Jeff Bridges) is neither viciously cool nor puerile about the unfettered female form. He’s just vaguely interested, then gets bowled over by neo-feminist, über-avant garde artist Maude (Julianne Moore), whose single motherhood is assured when she sleeps with an even more semi-conscious than normal Dude as he recovers from a drugged-out night at a porn mogul’s mansion watching topless girls bounce on trampolines. Sex, in most Coen films, comes out as a kind of odd, exotic, childish preoccupation.
 

For satirist Payne, the frailties of the flesh expose our human foibles. In Election, teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) lets himself go through sex as a mechanical, baby-producing exercise with his wife. Turning to porn in the basement and then an affair with the toothy Midwestern wife of a friend, Jim hits a new low when we see him crouched down in the bathtub of a seedy motel room, selectively cleaning himself off after a quickie.
 

This desperate, pleading lust is succeeded by About Schmidt, with Schmidt’s bewildered, trapped look when a naked Roberta (Kathy Bates) gets into the hot tub with him. The scene’s mostly at the expense of Schmidt (played by Jack Nicholson, a supposed Hollywood bad-boy bachelor), who finally realizes that his sexual horizons have narrowed as he’s overwhelmed by this woman’s laidback, robust sexuality.
 

But in Sideways, boastful Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is given the biggest blow of any Payne-ful, past-the-prime protagonist. His moment of conquest is really a sad come-down—we walk in on him only to see his sorry butt all a-quiver, mid-intercourse. And then there’s the naked, gut-roofed groin of a large man, pressed up against the window of Miles’ car in fury after he’s snuck into his house to retrieve cuckolding Jack’s wallet for him.

So here it is, petered out, after all the cool hero’s voyeurism and the adolescent fuss. It was a long time coming, but at last the movies expose the red-blooded North American male becoming tragicomically aware of the wrinkles, flab and basic farce of the flesh, the flush of his desire paling into a trembling, white-cheeked joke. V 

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