After That Last Tangle In Paris, I Swore Off the Stuff
This post is pure Tony Comstock bait, by which I mean: I genuinely want to know his answers to the questions I’m asking here. (BTW, the post should be considered reasonably safe for work, but I’m planning to talk pretty frankly.)
So, last night we rented and watched Dona Flor and her Two Husbands, a classic of Brazilian cinema. (Trailer here) The film was billed as an erotic triumph and, given that it stars Sonia Braga, and is about a woman who so misses her good-for-nothing-except-in-bed first husband that she conjures up his ghost to share her bed alongside her sweet and caring but not-exactly-an-erotic-powerhouse second husband, that would be a reasonable expectation.
But I found the film, while excellent, rather sad, and not really erotic. Why?
I’ve been puzzling over that all day, what the problem was. And I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have to do with the moral failings of the first husband, Vadinho. Rather, I think it has to do with his style of lovemaking.
The word that came to mind watching him “at work” was hunger. And, indeed, his style of lovemaking puts the “carne” back in “carnal” – he practically chews poor Sonia Braga’s face off. I’ve certainly experienced that kind of hunger, that ferocity of feeling. If you asked me, do I think I was at my best as a lover when I felt that way, I’d say no – you can’t be terribly sensitive when you’re in those kind of throes. But if you asked me, how badly do I hope to feel that way again, and yet again, of course the answer would be: badly.
But watching is not experiencing. I think it was Nabokov who said that art moves one to contemplation, pornography to action. So perhaps it was a sign of artistic merit that watching Vadinho moved me not to action, but to contemplation, a melancholy contemplation at that. But that can’t have been the director’s intent. Can it?
Erotic realism doesn’t have to be fraught, of course. Take The Sacred Mound which – if you can find it – I heartily recommend, as it will make you want to fly to Iceland immediately. I saw the film at a film festival many years ago, and we heard the director speak – about, among other things, how the film was received in different countries. When he flew to India for a screening, he was startled at the lines that formed around the block for this obscure film. “But there’s a naked blonde lady!” a young man informed him. In Egypt, by contrast, there were no lines, because the film was shown at an “invitation-only” all-male screening. And in Sweden, the film was used as part of the elementary school curriculum. Every one of these responses makes perfect sense to me; this is a very sexually frank film, including about the erotic feelings of children, that is also incredibly sweet and warm-souled. You would think this would move one to, if not contemplation, at least a kind of diffuse good feeling. But in my mind’s eye – hey! There’s a naked blonde lady!
And when it is fraught, that doesn’t necessarily dampen the erotic charge, but can enhance it. Take A Late Marriage, an Israeli film that contains what is certainly the most simultaneously realistic and erotic sex scene I’ve ever seen. (The trailer doesn’t really do the movie justice.) It’s a phenomenal scene, not only because of how it manages to bridge that chasm (of realism and eroticism), but because of how fully engaged both actors are, with each other, with their intimacy – how fully there they seem – and then you discover that it’s not just they were just actors acting: one of the characters wasn’t really all there, mentally. But we, the audience, are there – totally.
And then, of course, there’s this infamous scene from Tampopo. I guess it says more about my own sensibility than anything else that I find it an incredibly charged scene (actually, the one after it on the clip is pretty charged, too, and certainly more disturbing) – but where does this fall on the realism spectrum? It’s pretty much totally unrealistic, right? But not at all in the way that we think of “unrealistic” movie eroticism being totally unrealistic, right? And why is this hunger – and it’s palpable; I mean, there’s actual food involved, you know? – different from Vadinho’s? Would I actually want to do what this couple does? If not, why is watching it thrilling?
I have no idea where I’m going with this, and this is all probably film-school-101 stuff I’m asking. But I’ve been brooding about it all day and, being a blogger, I’ve wound up brooding about it in public. If this is at all of interest, feel free to take the discussion where you will.
On that last clip, I think the oral yoke-play (ewww) is meant to be a visual metaphor rather than a realistic or cinematic portrayal, an artistic signal to us, the audience, that a raw (ahem) intimacy exists between the characters. I do not think it’s supposed to be an attractive activity; the attraction is to what it means.
Like the sharing of the gum thing in My Girl (iirc), or Clementine taking a bite out of Joel’s chicken leg the first time she meets him in Eternal Sunshine — but more sexually suggestive and, well, unsanitary.
— JA · Apr 13, 10:40 PM · #
I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you, Noah. I’m not familiar with any of the films you’ve mentioned (unlike you, I mostly held fast to the oaths I took after LAST TANGO IN PARIS)
But while I don’t have any opinions on the above movies, I have a lot of opinions about the collision of sex and the moving image. If that’s what you’re looking for, I can hold forth at some considerable length.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 13, 10:47 PM · #
Heh — yolk, natch. Oral yoke-play would be quite different.
— JA · Apr 14, 01:18 AM · #
Oh, I’m going to enjoy this thread.
— PEG · Apr 14, 07:41 AM · #
The other thing I’d add: whether it’s Nabokov, or anyone else, even today, formulating an answer to the “Is it art, or is it porn?” question takes place against a backdrop of legal sanction and/or economic marginalization. Our ideas of what think is possible in the collision of sex and the moving image have been formed under duress. At the risk of sounding histrionic, dichotomies like contemplation vs action (false and ultimately harmful in my estimation) have been formulated at gunpoint (meant in a state-monopoly-of-violence kind of way.)
Interested parties will probably enjoy reading US v Ulysses.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 14, 12:19 PM · #
Here’s something to think about. In Donald Brown’s famous book Human Universals, a commonality in all human cultures is sexual modesty (sex behind closed tipis, doors). Evolutionary psychologists have a few plausible explanations for this, but that’s not what concerns me here.
Clearly, such behavior, to be universal, depends on equally universal and underlying motivational pressures toward sexual privacy. Further, as usually happens when dealing with these types of things, nature has seen fit to hedge its bet: not only is the randy individual motivated to take the bride inside; the observing others are given by nature a motivation to judge nonconforming behavior taboo. Thus, we usually see instinct and socialization pressures working in tandem to push sexual activity into the closet.
I think this might supply us a phenomenological distinction between porn and art. As Noah says, porn makes you randy, while art makes you contemplative. If the the above theory is correct, this randiness should be accompanied by an urge to retreat into private; put another way, watching porn in public should make you itch.
So a hypothesis: if you suddenly find yourself hyperaware of the other people in the room, what they are thinking, how they are judging, you’re body is telling you that you’re watching porn. If not, if you remain immersed in the story, you’re watching art.
Unfortunately, this means an globally objective measure is impossible, since part of this apparatus is socialization pressure. It does, however (that’s for Schwenkler), hold out the plausibility of a locally objective measure, where we can say, objectively, that in this circle (husband and wife, university class, Greenwich Village) it’s art, but in this circle (family, congregation, Huntsville AL) it’s porn.
Or not! Either way, thought it was interesting enough to pixelate.
— JA · Apr 14, 01:20 PM · #
Tony: I’m not sure Nabokov (assuming I’ve even got the right guy) was really talking about pornography qua pictures or descriptions of people screwing; I think he was talking more broadly. Thus, movies/books/etc that move one to violence, or, for that matter, to political action would count as “pornography” in terms of this dichotomy. In any event, I’m completely uninterested in the whole question from a legal perspective, and entirely interested from an artistic, psychological and social perspective – in descending order of interest.
JA: I like your distinction between whether you are hyperaware of other people or remain immersed in the artistic experience. What about situations where you become hyperaware of other people even though there’s nobody there? Or where the reason for that awareness has nothing to do with being “moved to action” but precisely being too “in” the story? That’s the way I react to certain scenes of great social embarrassment onscreen, particularly if I’m identifying strongly with the character in question. (Recent example: I had to pause the movie multiple times during Kym’s wedding toast in Rachel Getting Married to get control of my own state of pointless embarrassment; don’t ask me how I made it through the first half hour of What Happened Was . . ..) And what do you do with works of art that are not experienced so publicly even if experienced in public – audio (with headphones), text, etc?
Another distinction I’ve sometimes liked is: art heightens your sensitivity, while porn dulls it. Though i’m not really convinced that dichotomy works any better than the contemplation/action dichotomy – or any other dichotomy; that much I agree with Tony about.
But, really, I’m not that interested in drawing sharp distinctions; interested in understanding what makes the erotic powerful in art, particularly cinema, and why, and how that is similar to or different from the erotic in actual life.
— Noah Millman · Apr 14, 02:30 PM · #
Noah, that’s a great point about onscreen social embarrassment. My girlfriend is highly vulnerable to that stuff, to the point where she had to look away almost every time Paul Rudd opened his mouth in I Love You Man. It’s probably just a matter of highly-developed mirror neurons, but either way, it’s a fantastically interesting reaction to have to a movie.
re: the power of eroticism in cinema, as opposed to say, radio or theater. Clearly it has to do with sight and sound (but that can’t be the whole story). Equally clearly, it must have something to do with lighting, framing and editing, and how these techniques can be used to manipulate the viewer’s apperception.
Many good books have been written about this, so I’ll just give a brief example. Consider, in that sex scene in The Last Marriage, the way the film cuts between the lingering wide shot and the tight-two shots. The former anchors the scene in realism, while the latter shots put you right into the action, creating a sense of immediacy. In both shots, the sense of realism is preserved by unchoreographing the activity (and by the characters having a sexual-emotional maturity). This makes it seem like their intercourses are happening despite the camera rather than for it. Even the lighting is played for this realistic effect.
Another example of this technique, using a slow-zoom from wide to tight rather than a series of cuts, is that famous Beatrice Dalle sex scene in Betty Blue. The action is realistic, though the mood is heightened with soft lighting, and the eroticism slowly builds as we get closer.
re: what makes it similar to or different from real life. Great question. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s entirely subjective, depending on your emotional, experiential and cultural baggage — though I’m sure there are commonalities across persons and peoples.
— JA · Apr 14, 03:54 PM · #
JA, my impression is that you are a lawyer, and so I had assumed you were familiar with Miller v. California. But perhaps not. Here’s the important part:
* Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
* Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
* Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
Points one and two are the very embodiment of Jim Manzi’s “idiosyncratic communities”; interpretation of the First Amendment protections at a local level. So while I think you’ve provided provided a useful explanation of why seeing various cinematic (we’ll use this for any moving imagery) depictions of sexuality may feel transgressive, and why it may or may not feel transgressive to different people in different situations, I think what is missing is the way that the legal rubric under which such depictions are made all but forces these depictions into a binary that renders some expressions (and reaction) legitimate and others illegal.
To bring this back to Noah, who I sense feels discomfited by his experience of various art-films dealing with sex, I would suggest that at least part of this comes from, one one hand Noah’s thinking that he’s exposed himself to a wide range of cinematic interpretation of sexuality, but on the other, a sense that something that he knows is a part of his experience as a husband and a lover gets stripped away when sex is committed to celluloid. Again I would bring this back to US v Ulysses, and the long shadow this casts over the exploration of sexuality in art:
“[W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”And now while writing, my feed has informed me that Noah is “completely uninterested in the whole question from a legal perspective, and entirely interested from an artistic, psychological and social perspective – in descending order of interest.” I’m no more eager to see this conversation get bogged down in legalize about what is and isn’t porn. It’s a debate I found tedious in the extreme. But especially in a medium as expensive as film, there’s no separating the economics from the artistic, and when the subject is sex that means addressing the legal and economic climate under which artists make their choices about how to depict sex.
What that means from a practical stand point is that there’s been almost no serious inquiry into how to use the language of cinema when the mechanics of sex are (as Walter Murch puts it) closely observed. This make sex unique a subject for filmmaking.
Getting back to your experience with Dona Flor and her Two Husbands:
erhaps it was a sign of artistic merit that watching Vadinho moved me not to action, but to contemplation, a melancholy contemplation at that. But that can’t have been the director’s intent. Can it?Can this ambiguity tending towards melancholy be the director’s intent? Absolutely, and in fact it’s his legal/economic imperative. There’s a reason we don’t see unambiguous sexual joy in films featuring sexual explicit imagery.
The depiction of unabashed sexual joy is understood to by the dividing line between serious artistic inquiry and exploitation; between protected speech and criminal activity. John Cameron Mitchell on his film SHORTBUS:
:
“The erotically charged plot is not meant to arouse the audience-No one got a hard-on watching this film… We tried to de-eroticize the sex to see what kind of emotions and ideas are left over when the haze of eroticism is waved away.”
Now consider the justification by the BBFC for granting DESTRICTED the vastly less restrictive R rating than the R-18 that the BBFC’s own guidelines suggest would be appropriate:
“In purpose and effect, this work is plainly a serious consideration of sex and pornography as aspects of the human experience. We think that there are no grounds for depriving adults of the ability to decide themselves whether they want to see it.”
DESTRICTED contained all manner of sexual explicit footage, including masturbation, anal sex and footage appropriated from what is commonly understood to be pornography. It also is so unpleasant to watch that when it screens publicly, it routinely clears half the audience. But it is “art”, the BBFC and the OFCL say so. So the same night that it was having it’s Australian premiere at ACMI, complete with an academic discussion of the difference between art and pornography, police were dispatched to prevent the premiere of our own unambiguously erotic and celebrity “Ashley and Kisha: Finding the Right Fit.” DESTRICTED can be purchased in the book store at the Tate Museum. “Ashley and Kisha” is illegal to sell in the UK.
So, if you “genuinely want to know his answers to the questions I’m asking here” please do take a little time to consider the legal and economic environment in which films about sex are made, and consider how the effects the sort of films you have an opportunity to see.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 14, 03:56 PM · #
“Many good books have been written about this”
JA, If you’re not familiar with it, I think you would find it amusing to have a look at the Hays Code; and then perhaps spend sometime imagining what we might think we know about cinematic violence if the site of blood were all but unknown; or what we might think we know about cinematic romance if the touching of mouths were all but unknown.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 14, 04:38 PM · #
The tension seems to lie between what kind of sex you like and what you believe is expected from you. You may not think yourself the best in the throws of desire, I would recommend you ask your lover.
— Cascadian · Apr 14, 06:31 PM · #
The tension seems to lie between what kind of sex you like and what you believe is expected from you.
Reading this bit, I was thinking something similar:
The word that came to mind watching him “at work” was hunger. And, indeed, his style of lovemaking puts the “carne” back in “carnal” – he practically chews poor Sonia Braga’s face off. I’ve certainly experienced that kind of hunger, that ferocity of feeling. If you asked me, do I think I was at my best as a lover when I felt that way, I’d say no – you can’t be terribly sensitive when you’re in those kind of throes. But if you asked me, how badly do I hope to feel that way again, and yet again, of course the answer would be: badly.
My experience is that at least sometimes, my lovers have very much like being on the receiving end of this sort of hunger; and for myself I very much like the feeling that I am able to ignite passions that transcend propriety. In fact, it’s one my very favorite things!
I won’t suppose to go any further with guesses about Noah’s sexuality, but for myself, coming to an understanding that aggression is neither pro-social or nor anti-social had been helpful. Our language is not well equipped to differentiate that “ferocious hunger” from the desire to hurt, control, annihilate. But they are not the same thing.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 14, 06:42 PM · #
Man, I mean “A Late Marriage.” I’m getting as bad as my father.
Tony, I am a lawyer, by a long and circuitous route (motivated by, what else, a beautiful woman). Btw, thanks for reminding me of the Hays Code. I hadn’t thought about that for years.
— JA · Apr 15, 04:00 AM · #
I think you are all making it too complex, there is very simple way to define if something is porn or not, would you proudly display it on a shelf in your living room or be embarrassed if anyone saw it:-)
— eric k · Apr 15, 05:03 AM · #
erik k: that would be a perfectly workable definition if what is and is not pornography were purely a private concern, but it is not.
JA: to me, one of the most interesting things about the Hays Code is that it gave way, not in the face of what you might call “rights humpers” but in the face of my old friend, commerce.
By the early Sixties, films made outside the studio system were gaining increasing traction in the US market, and the MPAA was under increasing pressure to find a way for their member studios to be able to make films with the same candor as their competitors. (There was also some rights humping; read Jacobellis v. Ohio.)
The MPAA’s solution was the four-tiered ratings system we have today, with one difference: X instead of NC-17 for the Adults Online rating. (Even during the Hays Code, there had always been an Adult Online rating, but Adult it didn’t have the shabby connotation it has today.) The reason is a quirky bit of trademark law, good intentions and unforeseen consequences.
When the MPAA introduced the G, PG, R, and X system, they trademarked all but the X-rating. As the new Adults Only rating, by feeling at the MPAA was that producers should be free to self-assign the rating without subjecting their film to MPAA review.The MPAA had cast their post Hays Code role as “advice to parents”, so why should they be concerned with a film that was described by it’s producers at Adults Only, or X-rated. “Midnight Cowboy” is famous for being the only X-rated film to win an Oscar, but many (most?) people don’t understand the context and don’t understand what X-rated meant in 1969. If you’re interest, there’s a more fleshed out version of the timeline at my blog:
How “X-rated” Came to Mean “Porn” and the Death of Movies for Grown-ups
The other thing is that at least in the conversations I’ve had with both the MPAA and NATA, they’re more than a little contrite about both losing control of the X-rating, and bungling the introduction of the NC-17 rating (which is trademarked), and fully aware of how it has distorted movie making.
I had a long conversation with Senior board member Tony Hey about the “ratings creep” that’s occurred since “Adults Only” (by whatever name) has become a cinematic dead-zone; and he readily acknowledges that the difference in what is considered an acceptable level of violence vs an acceptable level of nudity/sexuality at the various ratings levels is an odd statement on the values of our culture. But the board’s mandate is to assign ratings on the basis of what their best assessment of what an average parent would think; and on the basis of the feedback they get, mostly they get it right.
That maybe says more about who complains, how loudly, and about what. But that’s the way the world works, right?
— Tony Comstock · Apr 15, 12:00 PM · #
Tony,
I know I was mostly just making a clever joke
— eric k · Apr 15, 04:26 PM · #
I know I was mostly just making a clever joke
When police stop your films from being screened, or university professors or merchants tell you they can’t use or sell your DVD for fear or prosecution the joke isn’t very funny.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 15, 04:46 PM · #