Cinema: In Defense of Dirty Movies

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Sex and violence. They are yoked in the politician's sermon like Sodom and Gomorrah or Bonnie and Clyde. Their effect on the young is pernicious, folks: film violence will put a gun in a kid's hand; film sex will grow hair on his palm. But this argument didn't come from anyone who actually goes to movies. Sure, there's film violence, so much that it's numbing. But where's the sex?

Most R-rated films get that tag for lurid violence and language. If there's a bosom on display, it's usually either as a gag (the prosthetic dugs in There's Something About Mary) or a lure to humiliation (in next week's American Pie) or as power-play kink (in Summer of Sam). Nothing erotic--just the use of flesh as a tool of degradation. In the typical movie, sex is violence.

A film sex scene demands a certain seriousness on the part of the viewer. That's hard to find now that moviegoing is essentially an infantile experience. We convene in a big, dark room and laugh at what shocks us. This may be why the consumption of movie eroticism has become solitary. Porn theaters have given way to triple-X videos, lap dancing to laptops.

O.K., you say: sex is back in the home, where it belongs. Let it flourish on late-night pay cable, in quickie dramas starring gents who have spent more time at the gym than at acting class and women with chests they bought, like heavy Victorian furniture, from a Beverly Hills silicone surgeon.

It's not O.K. Sex is too important to be left to the sex-film industry. The erotic impulse and its consequences are crucial. Lovemaking is a powerful experience, the most convulsive emotional and physical drama in most people's lives. And it warrants as much artful attention from film auteurs as space operas or teen revenge fantasies.

It got that much 25, 30 years ago, when sexuality was a subject that attracted serious moviemakers and moviegoers. The X-rated Midnight Cowboy won the top Oscar for 1969; Columbia Pictures released the sexy French film Emmanuelle and made a bundle; Marlon Brando poured out his heart and his lust in Last Tango in Paris (back then the erotic accessory was butter, not hair gel, and its application was an adventure, not a joke). You had to be 18 to see these films, but so what? Then the kids took over the box office. Hollywood learned how to eroticize violence and forgot how to dramatize eroticism. The new hot hands were directors (Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese) who didn't care to portray sexual romance. Eros died.

With Eyes Wide Shut, the corpse sits up, erect again. If the film is a hit, it will help Hollywood remember what makes us tick, and tingle, and hurt, and come back for more. We might even get the full-frontal revelation of two souls abrading in the night.

--By Richard Corliss