The End of the Hollywood Sex Scene
Why aren’t we still watching movies for the sex?
BY KATE HAKALA
It seems America’s #1 favorite topic ever, sex, will be taking a backseat to violence and talking animals in Hollywood movies.
According to
Vincent Bruzzese, film research expert of Ipsos, a firm which analyzes
scripts for major studios, Hollywood isn’t looking for sex scenes
anymore when pitching future blockbusters. He claims, "Sex scenes used
to be written, no matter the plot, to spice up a trailer. But all that
does today is get a film an adult-only rating and lose a younger
audience.” He admits that sex scenes have sold so poorly in the last two
years that, "Today such scenes are written out by producers even before
they are shot.” When I first heard this, I didn’t quite believe it. Of
course sex in cinema is still as ubiquitous as ever. Then I thought
about it, and realized it isn’t that common in movies that actually do
well.
Let’s compare the box office gross profits (granted, they had different budgets) of
Shame (2011), the sex-filled examination of sexual addiction, and Oscar-darling
Silver Linings Playbook (2012), which follows the life of a recovering sex addict but does not, in fact, include a sexy scene.
Shame grossed roughly
4 million, while
Silver Linings Playbook brought in
127 million. The difference between them is not only that my editor despises one of them, but that
Silver Linings Playbook
has become more palatable to the 2013 mainstream climate. The zeitgeist
favors both family-oriented films and flicks full of special effects
and gun violence, which are cheap to produce, over realistic,
provocative depictions of human sexuality. Sex scenes require
rehearsing, clearing of no-nudity clauses, the development of chemistry,
and the hiking of R ratings, whereas CGI takes a computer and some
imagination. The latter will time and time again have a wider audience.
In 2012, out of the top 20 grossing films of the year, only
four included any sex scenes, and only one of those,
Ted, was R-rated.
And the resounding
trend I
see on the
internet’s
“Best Movie Sex Scenes” lists* is that they all feature movies that are
mainly over ten years old. In fact, the last movie to top the box
office that included a truly hot and heavy love scene was
Titanic (who could forget that smudged hand print on the car window?), but that was a depressingly long sixteen years ago.
Adrian Lyne, director/provocateur behind such films that top these lists like
Fatal Attraction,
Unfaithful, and
9 ½ Weeks, credits his lack of artistic output to Hollywood’s diluted treatment of sex in the last few years. He
claims
that real, raw sex has been sequestered to art films: “Would Fatal
Attraction get made at a studio today? Not in a thousand years.”
Actually going to films in the theater (the thing that box office
statistics actually reflect) is a rare and celebrated event. And, if
cultural prognosticators and Hollywood insiders are correct, we’re
mostly going with our families and close friends, people who we don’t
necessarily want to watch somebody reenact cunnilingus next to. If we’re
not all rushing to the theaters in droves to pull a Paul Reubens, then
the market will act accordingly. So, Hollywood is watering down and
trimming the fat on our sex scenes, and we’re hardly going to notice or
complain. That’s because the instantly gratifying and instantly
watchable source for our sex scenes can be found on TV and in porn. They
satiate our prurient needs and we don’t even have to leave the house.
While Hollywood films have been cleaning up, instances of sexual
gratuity, thanks to HBO, Showtime, AMC, and the like, have increased
exponentially. This
infographic from Wired
illustrates how sex on TV is slowly becoming not only a substantial
alternative to cinematic sex, but also, an integral plot-driving force
on smartly written shows. These are companies that know their target
audience is mature, and thus, they are able to produce sexually
explicit and rousing content that reflects a reality a placated,
family-oriented audience is not ready for.
If Hollywood sex is going the way of the dodo, this might say more
about the American family’s relationship to violence and visual
stimulation than its relationship to sex itself. We may have now become
a culture that feels safer watching a city be bombed to death with
their mom than they feel safe watching somebody feeling pleasure next to
their mom. Here’s hoping that in the future, mainstream Hollywood’s
lack of sexual depictions, be they plot-driven or gratuitous, becomes so
glaringly apparent, that we no longer find subdued, second base
representations tasteful as much as outdated. Only then will the
highly-grossing arthouse, gritty scenes that once engaged our
imaginations and our sexuality come back onto our movie stubs.
*If you're feeling flaccid and mopey about modern Hollywood sex scenes, take a gander through Nerve's
Hollywood Sex Scene Database.
