Hard-Core Art Film: the Contemporary Realm of the Senses Linda Williams 3 4
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2 portàtils Quaderns Quaderns 13 Hard-Core Art Film: The Contemporary Realm of the Senses Linda Williams 3 4 George Steiner once famously accused pornographers of subverting the “last, vital privacy” of sex by doing “our imagining for us.”1 But rather than complain that movies increasingly leave nothing to the imagination, I argue that we might do better to approach the imagination as a faculty that perpetually plays with the limits of what is given. Christian Metz has described the cinema as a kind of “permanent strip-tease” whose “wandering framings (wandering like the look, like the caress)” can even take back what it has already given us to see.2 This talk offers a few Hard-Core Art Film: recent examples of the ways the imagination has been invited to respond to hard-core sex beyond pornography. It is an unfortunate fact that most of the films I want to discuss below, with one important ex- The Contemporary ception are not American. This fact is partly the result of what I have described in the full version of this book3 as the artificially “long adolescence of American movies,” occasioned first by the Production Code and then later the MPAA ratings system of the late sixties, nei- Realm of the Senses ther of which really allowed American cinema to “grow up.” This more system of assigning presumably age-appropriate labels avoids the outright prohibitions of the Code but has undoubtedly contributed to the continued arrested development of American movies, and Linda Williams American audiences, with regard to genuinely adult sexual content. While short duration female nudity is tolerated, male nudity is not, and an acute double-standard, brilliantly illustrated in Kirby Dick’s 2006 documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, prevails in the simulated representations of gay and straight sex.4 My aim is not to rail against these sys- Since the nineties, critics who discuss the performance of sex in movies have often distin- tems, however, but to begin to organize a typology of the hard-core art film chosen from a guished between simulated sex, in which great care is taken to avoid the display of sexual range of possibilities. I have four to offer. organs, and unsimulated sex, in which male and female sexual organs are aggressively on display. When shown on American screens, simulated sex usually receives R-ratings; unsimulated sex either gets NC-17 or no rating at all, consequently reaching very small audiences. In this talk I propose we call this emerging class of films hard-core art and recognize their ambition to be something like—but also more than—pornography. I also Lyrical Sex propose that we eliminated the awkward term unsimulated sex entirely. When the acclaimed British art film director, Michael Winterbottom, decided to tell the story of Hard-core art films do not single-mindedly display sexual organs in the manner of hard-core por- a love affair by concentrating almost exclusively on its sexual content, his Nine Songs (2004) nography, but neither do they artfully hide sex organs the way simulated R-rated films do. immediately became the most sexually explicit film in the entire history of British cinema.5 These films are the bold inheritors of Oshima Nagisa’sIn the Realm of the Senses even if they In this film Winterbottom stages a very slight story about a man and woman who meet at no longer share the politics of revolutionary transgression that marked that “benchmark” film. The films of hard-core art may be aggressive, violent, humiliating, desperate, alienating, 1 George Steiner, “Night Words.” New York: Atheneum, 1967. tender, loving, playful, joyous and, of course, boring, but they are art films that, likeRealm , 2 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, London: McMillan, 1982, p. 77. embrace explicit sexual content. 3 Editor’s note: This text is a part of Screening Sex, a book to be published by Duke University Press in Fall 2008. 4 In addition to Kirby Dick’s excellent film, see also Joan West and Dennis West, “MPAA Ratings, Black Holes, and My Film: An Interview with Kirby Dick.” Cineaste 23.1 (Winter 2006), pp. 14-37. It is something of a critical truism that works about sex that “leave nothing to the imagination” 5 The Guardian makes this claim, listing the sex scenes as unsimulated “fellatio, ejaculation and cunnilingus, many in are inferior because of pornographic expectations that seem to come with the territory. close-up.” (May 17, 2004) http://film.guardian.co.uk/cannes2004/story. 5 6 a London concert, have sex and begin a relationship. The rest of the film portrays their at- Winterbottom next shows Lisa confessing that sometimes when they kiss she wants to bite tendance at subsequent concerts inter-cut with further sex and small fragments of meals, him hard enough to make him bleed. We see the couple next at a sex club, not their usual holidays, pillow-talk and mornings-after. All of this is framed by the man’s sparse voice-over concert. The rock concerts are Matt’s passion and Lisa will tellingly opt out of the next recollection of the affair as he does climate research in the icy regions of Antarctica. one. The sex club, however, seems to be her passion. During this brief scene, we hear a woman in a recording sing the blues. Though it is only a snippet of sound, it forces the All of the songs contribute to a lyrical portrayal of sex. Literally so, for each sex act behaves realization that all the other music in the live concerts has been by male rockers. Whatever like a song, with something akin to a song’s effusion of emotion and economy of presenta- Lisa’s song may be, it may not be any of the other songs we hear in this film. tion. But despite this superficial resemblance to what I call the “musical sexual interlude of Hollywood tradition,” and to the regular sexual “numbers” of hard-core pornography, Soon after we see Lisa alone in bed with a vibrator as Matt forlornly looks on. We can only none of the lyrical sex moments are matched up to, or accompanied by, the music of the surmise that she no longer seems to find Matt fulfilling as a lover. After Lisa appears to songs. Instead of adding music to sex, which would have amounted to a sort of hard-core orgasm she weeps, perhaps mourning what she now anticipates to be the end of the affair. MTV, Winterbottom seeks to discover the lyricism within the sex, most of which is pre- We may recall at this point that in most of their sexual encounters it has been Lisa, not sented unaccompanied by the concert music, or with just a small bit of piano. Matt, who has been the first to pull apart. Now, Lisa clings to Matt, but it is the clinging of the partner who best knows that the end is near and is mourning the relationship’s loss. To appreciate Nine Songs—and not everyone does!—one must abandon the expectation that the sex scenes will become part of a larger plot and character development. Winterbot- If we accept Nine Songs’ premise that what we learn about the couple must come from the tom’s gamble—which only partly pays off—is that the sensual substance of a love affair substance of the sexual relationship itself, then we should not look for a narrative expla- can just as well be captured through sexual and musical lyricism as through dramatic nation for why Lisa leaves but to the story told by the sex. What we learn from its per- event or extended dialogue. The sex scenes, like the music scenes, offer moments that formance is that Lisa is more “out there”—both more sexually frank and more sexually are set apart from everyday life. Yet Winterbottom also keeps them remarkably separate, demanding: she reads pornography out loud and speaks her sexual fantasies. Matt does one from the other, respecting the different spaces of noisy public concert and quiet neither. We also suspect, from hints about female friends, that she may be inclined toward private sexual encounter. women. When Lisa demonstrates that she can satisfy herself through masturbation with a vibrator, the point is not the inherent alienation of technologically-aided masturbation, Like many sexually explicit filmmakers of his generation, Winterbottom has claimed that but a way of showing the disconnect occurring between the once-passionate couple. We Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses was his “benchmark.” Yet he does not reproduce the have been witness to a highly nuanced chronicle of an affair presented and understood “mad love” and sexual excess of that earlier film. Rather, he chronicles the male lover’s primarily through its many and varied acts of sex. And we are given to understand that recollections of the arc of a love affair that reaches its peak at about the fifth concert and sometimes the “hottest” sex in a relationship can occur after the potential for mutual love that afterwards fades, apparently more quickly for the woman than for the man. After has been foreclosed, when a certain desperation has entered the proceedings. the third song, while on a brief holiday, the man, Matt, declares his love after plunging into the frigid sea, yelling to the woman, Lisa, “I love you!” She does not answer. Later, Though the film does leave one hungry for more story, especially Lisa’s, the development, we see the couple in the bathtub. Lisa casually caresses Matt’s erection with first one mood and execution of each sexual scene creates a coherent arc of relationship that is and then both of her feet.