Michael Gillespie looks at the awkward relationship cinema audiences have with depictions of sexuality.
I recently attended a screening of Steve McQueen’s sex addiction drama Shame. Hardly revelatory: many people, or at least, many cineastes, did. The film was fine, a little too wilfully oblique on occasion for my tastes, but an engaging and thoughtful piece nonetheless. So what was so special about the screening I attended? Well, as is often the case, it was not the film, but the audience. This was the case with Drag Me To Hell, Inglourious Basterds, The Mist and Inception, to name a few. In those instances, however, it was because of the communal, collective exhilaration felt by us all, everyone completely in tune with the picture and putty in the makers’ hands. In the case of Shame, it was the complete opposite, and it’s something that not only puts so many off going to the cinema anymore (noise!!!), but specifically, why so few mainstream filmmakers explore the subject of sexuality anymore. The audience. They sniggered.
Pauline Kael famously predicted a new wave of mature erotic cinema in the wake of Last Tango In Paris, a wave that of course would never come to shore. There are many reasons for this. The spectacle of violence and FX would of course replace the philosophical, psychological cinema of the 70s and only come back in short bursts through the years. There was also the MPAA’s new NC-17 classification, ostensibly a good thing until puritanical forces decided it was disreputable and the rating became box office poison. And let’s not start on the Bush administration’s attitudes…
These are all valid points originally made by smarter people than myself. What they all failed to mention, perhaps because it is a modern phenomenon, is that cinema audiences just cannot watch sex without regressing to embarrassed children. Shame was a textbook example of this. Almost every shot of nudity was met with childish giggles; every sex scene was accompanied by muttering and sniggering, while the ending seemed to elicit much elated laughter. I would like to think this was because the incredibly sophisticated audience were on this occasion merely unimpressed by the film’s formal trickery and uninspired by its attempts to provoke discourse on the subject of sex addiction, but alas, I would be wrong.
This wasn’t the first time I’ve experienced this and it won’t be the last. Gangs of New York’s mere glimpses of breasts and Miami Vice’s romps were met with guffaws, while Chloe turned a group of old dears hysterical (actually, might let them off the hook). These were all multiplex experiences, but sadly, smarmily spoken, Guardian reading arthouse audiences aren’t much better.
Watching 9 Songs sent one viewer into a justified rage when two young gentlemen simply could not contain themselves at the mere sight of flesh. The audience with whom I watched the sex scene in Red Road became so giggly that one of them felt the need to scream out a question about it at the Q&A, one that never quite made sense. I could go on: Brokeback Mountain (this is an uncomfortably common reaction to images of homosexuality), The Dreamers, Sex and Lucia, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Last Days, Lust, Caution, Solaris, Where The Truth Lies, Enter The Void and The Wrestler (the latter two were, incidentally, press screenings!), to name just a few.
So what exactly is the problem here? Is it simply that most people simply feel awkward when faced with sexual images in a public environment, as Michael Winterbottom has suggested? Is it that we live in a culture where sex remains such a taboo that youngsters can only gauge knowledge of it through cosmeticised pornography (indeed, Shame touches on these ideas)? And is this merely a British, or transatlantic thing? Do European audiences, whose filmmakers have given us some of the best explorations of sex in recent cinema, endure the same juvenile antics? I somehow doubt it. But next time you’re in the cinema, and there’s a sudden hint that there might, just might, be images of coitus, please, in between annoying me with your mobile phone, refrain from laughter. It’s not big, it’s not clever, and if you’re on a date, it’s definitely not gonna get you laid.
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