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December 11, 2003
OGIC: Out of sight
Dear Terry,Your temperature-reading of sex in the movies the other day seems to me right on the money: "I'm not prudish about on-screen sex: I just don't think it tends to be especially memorable or persuasive." This is just what I was trying to say when I wrote here about my problems with the film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove. Here's part of what I wrote about that movie's sex scene (a scene not depicted in the novel, only suggested):
But if the sex scene comes off as just another ho-hum sex scene...you risk making Densher seem like just some pathetic bounder, altogether unworthy of Milly, and tipping the delicate balance of imperatives that gives James's moral drama its life. And this is what happens. Densher sacrifices Milly for the promise of a night with Kate, that night turns out to consist of bland movie sex, and the whole story becomes hard to take seriously, the dénouement easy to misunderstand. It wasn't just the censors that held James back from depicting the sex in his novel; it was solid professional know-how.
In the novel, this off-stage encounter changes something between the characters. The reader can't be sure just how or why it does so, in a typical example of strategic Jamesian ambiguity. But once the filmmaker decides to depict the sex scene, he damn well needs to have an idea about how and why it changes things, and a means of communicating this to the viewer. My distinct impression when I saw Wings (and it has been a while, I'll admit) was that the director was more interested in hottening up Henry James than in linking what happens behind Merton's bedroom door to the film's dénouement. All we learn from the scene as rendered, though, is that he and Kate have sex (and that it is generically steamy). This being the case, one of Renoir's closed doors would have been far more economical, and probably more affecting.
I like your list of movies that do it right (The Big Easy is what I always think of first), though I am woefully underexposed to John Sayles. I would add to the list Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight, where the sex is intercut with clips from the hotel-bar seduction that precedes it. The characters laugh as they undress, and feel a little bit bad in the morning. These details manage to be familiar, yet anything but generic.
And speaking of undressing, did you notice the hit we got yesterday from somebody's Google search for "jennifer+aniston+fully+naked"? I'm shocked, shocked, that we would have come up in such a search: when did either of us ever mention Jennifer Aniston?
Posted December 11, 2003 1:28 AM
