The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire

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The disappearance of the sex scene in American cinema, the suppression of the body under the moral imperative of commodities in neoliberal capitalism, and Verhoeven as antagonizer.
This essay is a contribution to a special issue that explores the potential resurgence of the erotic thriller genre in contemporary US media landscape: “The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema and Streaming”

Introduction

Are movies having enough sex? When Nomi Malone is told by the owner of the casino she’s headlining at in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995), “You are the show,” we understand Verhoeven’s obvious point about the commodification of sex in America, but there is a deeper meaning to that statement, and the statement of much of Verhoeven’s work, including Showgirls, that speaks to the connection between our bodies, our bodily experiences, and the spectacle of consumerism. That at a certain point in time, our corporeal existence was still a space to find thrills — particularly within mainstream Hollywood cinema — to find moments of ecstasy and pleasure, to luxuriate in the feeling of being pulled in by spectacle, being implicated in it, rather than experiencing it at a remove with our bodily involvement suppressed or blocked altogether. There was a time, when, as movie-goers, we were part of the show, when our participation in the story — with our hearts, our minds, our bodies — was part of the experience of watching the film, and essentially completed the work itself. That time is gone.

“You are the show”

If you ask Paul Verhoeven if movies are having enough sex, he’ll patently answer “no.” In an interview with Variety in July of 2021, Verhoeven says,

There’s been a general shift towards Puritanism. I think there’s a misunderstanding about sexuality in the United States. Sexuality is the most essential element of nature. I’m always amazed people are shocked by sex in movies.¹

He’d be right. There is a general shift toward Puritanism not just in movies, but in broader popular culture and our political realities, asserted by both liberal and conservative politics to varying degrees (police budgets are bigger than they’ve ever been, abortion rights are being repealed across the country, countless states are passing dangerous and harmful legislation ostensibly outlawing transgender people’s right to exist, certainly the #MeToo movement has changed our societal posture toward sex, with benefits and drawbacks, the culture wars insist we focus our attention on artifacts and language of culture rather than on our material realities, the list is endless).

How should we understand The Sex Scene in Hollywood – and the absence of sex scenes that were so much more prolific in films of the near-past like Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995) – within the context of the broader landscape of the commodification of all aspects of our lived experience (including sex, our bodies, our emotions, our relationships) under neoliberal capitalism?

The sex scene in the algorithm-driven, market-oriented age

In the last 25 years, the time since the erotic thriller, and more broadly speaking the mid-budget adult drama, had its heyday², sex (its depiction, its implication, its exploration, and importantly, our desire and literacy for it) has steadily disappeared.

Unpacking the complexities of this shift is no simple task. There are several important, symbiotic dynamics at work here: the changes to the modes — the actual processes, the mechanisms, and mediums — of movie making over the last 10-15 years in particular, the changes in the modes through which we consume film and media, the continued expansion of the free market and its demands for higher profit margins and less risk (particularly in the film industry) and, of course implied in all of the aforementioned is, the continued immiseration of a pleasure-and-sustenance-deprived populace living under the late stages of neoliberal capitalism. These dynamics have resulted in a chicken-egg type phenomenon, wherein the increased commodification of films and the ideas and images contained in them, and the winnowing away of our material stability has left little room for sex in movies, and simultaneously bludgeoned the appetite for it out of us.

The fetishizing of the free market, deregulation, and privatization has been working its dark magic on our lives for decades. But things have escalated at a rapid clip in the last 20 years (the crash of dot coms at the millennium, September 11th, the housing market crash of 2008, the 2016 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing recession we’re still in the throes of, and the mass violence we are witnessing against the Palestinians through screens in the palms of our hands are just some of the paradigm-shifting events of the last two decades). During this time, the consolidation of media ownership has reduced the number of major studios, distributors, and exhibitors in the film industry, alongside the rise of on-demand viewing and streaming platforms and social media apps as primary modes of media consumption. What’s emerged is a highly competitive environment where the profit demands are higher than ever, and films are now increasingly designed by boardrooms, market-testing, and artificially intelligent algorithms. In his essay for Vox, “Can Monoculture Survive the Algorithm?” Kyle Chayka writes, “The algorithm is a replacement for our internal monologues and our judgments about what we want to consume. Streaming’s passivity is different from linear TV, but in the end, it’s still passive”³.

The use of market research, test screenings, and audience segmentation to identify “the most profitable concepts” and target specific demographics, has led to a definitive homogenization of media and film. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is taking on a new shape in the digital age. In the past, the Monoculture referred to the middleclass, white American entertainment that dominated popular culture and media during the final peak of broadcast television. Today the Digital Monoculture operates with the same hegemonic forces, but with a different set of characters and characteristics, particularly those that thrive in a digital landscape of easily recognizable and instantly consumable reference points that can be taken in during the time it takes for something to pass your gaze mid-scroll. Chayka writes,

Digital media, by contrast, prioritizes immediate engagement over the slow blooming of art. I get the sense that today’s algorithms would prioritize Deep Dream patterns — a memetic style without content — over late Rembrandt. The danger of prioritizing the monoculture is that we might not get as many Rembrandts in the future.⁴

So we’re left with a landscape wherein films that are algorithmically deemed to have a higher chance of success are given more resources and marketing budgets, while riskier projects, projects that might appeal to a smaller number of people rather than the entirety of the four quadrants, are often ignored or underfunded, or go directly to streaming, or become serialized in some way. And sex scenes – and films like Basic Instinct and Showgirls in the 90s – don’t appeal to the four quadrants, do they, if the four quadrants contain children as a key audience demographic lumped in with the rest of the movie-going public. Not only are entertainment conglomerates afraid of having their reputation (and their balance sheets) linked with “potentially controversial” content and art, but the mediums through which we consume most media and art are ones that enable increased censorship, curation, and algorithmically designed personalization — digital streaming platforms can more readily be controlled and manipulated by the corporations (and technology) that run them.

The decline of the sex scene as fall-out accompanying the decline of the mid-budget adult drama comes with the profit motive ratcheting up to the point where the only “economically viable” ventures are those that appeal to four quadrant audience map. It “seems like it’s almost a backdoor way of making the observation that most of cinema is now Marvel-adjacent, superheroes, etc. So I wonder if it’s not even necessarily about the absence of the sex scene but about the absence of the general environment in which the sex scene would be warranted” Doreen St. Felix writes in The New Yorker⁵. Even the errant superhero movie in the 90s was more than likely still one made primarily for adults, with adult themes, including and especially sex. Take for example, Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992), a film alight with sexual imagery and language — everything from Michelle Pfieffer’s BDSM Catwoman to the slinky euphemisms that populate nearly every scene of dialogue.

Batman Returns oozes with lust. Both Penguin and Batman yearn for Catwoman’s touch, even if it means being clawed. (Perhaps especially then!) For her part, Pfeiffer leaned into the sex kitten allure, lounging across beds in that leather-fetish suit, giving herself a bath with a long pink tongue, and snarling that blood-red lip in such a way that she and her whip launched countless crushes.⁶

Pfeiffer leaned into the sex kitten allure in Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992)

This current Marvel-adjacent world — a world of familiar characters, endless sequels and reduxes, franchises that stretch decades, a world that is constantly looking back and never forward to something new, something not previously made or tested — is one that Mark Fisher anticipates in his luminary work, Capitalist Realism, where he discusses the impulse of recursion in our cultural output as an expression of the anxiety contained in our acceptance of the catastrophe that is capitalism, contained in our deluded acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism. “The future – Fisher writes – harbors only reiteration and re-permutation”⁷.

Nostalgia and re-permutation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021)

Indeed, the market asserts that what we’ve loved before we’ll love again, and that not only will this recursive posture lead to certain profit, but the halo of nostalgia that comes along with it will generate an extra boost in capital to boot. ​​The drive to capitalize on the childhood favorites of those who now have spendable income and drive a large portion of the market means that most of our media is based on children’s artifacts from 30 years ago, and franchises originally made for children. “Piggybacking on old monoculture is less risky than starting from scratch”⁸ writes Chayka. Indeed, Fisher cites a one T.S. Eliot and his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as prophesying this kind of infantilization of the public, and our cultural outputs:

Eliot…described the reciprocal relationship between the canonical and the new. The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new…Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.⁹

We are continuously, constantly cryogenically freezing cultural outputs from the past to be consumed in the present. But these artifacts are deranged ghosts of what they once were, distorted visions of the familiar, a signifier of a feeling we once had, all of the thing’s original meaning and emotional resonance stripped away in order to serve one purpose: automatic consumption that generates capital.

This is, to say the least, not a very sexy time in which to live.

The simultaneous decline of the mid-budget adult drama with the rise of the superhero franchise and broader four-quadrant proclivities of the business of movie-making has not only sterilized our stories, but it’s also sterilized the actors that populate them.

Movies in the 1980s and 1990s didn’t just have more sex, they also had bodies that looked and felt real, in addition to being beautiful. Take for example, Elias Koteas’s character, Vaughan, in David Cronenberg’s resplendent masterpiece, Crash (1996). Koteas’s Vaughan is covered in scars, has a receding hairline, and has grotesque tattoos on his torso. Yet he is one of the film’s protagonists who is positioned as a sex symbol and object of desire within the world of the film (and for the audience), and he is in fact, incredibly alluring and sexy — his draw is undeniable. In this way, sex in movies like Crash and its contemporaries like Color of Night (Richard Rush, 1994), The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994), and Basic Instinct felt more human, more connected to the viewer, the thrill of the possible bringing us in, allowing us to live vicariously through people on screen. While one could argue that Crash is an auteur’s film, and while its director, David Cronenberg, is Canadian, the movie was produced with Hollywood money by a major Hollywood studio (New Line Cinema), and the actors in it (James Spader, Holly Hunter, Rosanna Arquette) were and are major Hollywood stars. The film is for all intents and purposes, in the canon of mid-budget adult dramas and more specifically erotic thrillers coming out of Hollywood in the 80s and 90s.

Vaughan in Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)

The hyper-fit, plasticine figures of today’s movies automatically put us at a further remove, and perhaps that’s why it’s easier for us to detach our corporeal and emotional selves from the experience of watching movies, and why perhaps, when we are met with something that necessarily pierces that easy distance — like a sex scene — we recoil. As Raquel S. Benedict writes in her brilliant (and often plagiarized) piece for Blood Knife Magazine, “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny”,

In the films of the Eighties and Nineties, leading actors were good looking, yes, but still human. Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken was a hunk, but in shirtless scenes his abs have no definition. Bruce Willis was handsome, but he’s more muscular now than he was in the Nineties, when he was routinely branded a bona fide sex symbol.¹⁰

One of Bruce Willis’s nude scenes in the erotic thriller Color of Night (Richard Rush, 1994)

What would a conversation about 21st century American popular culture and politics be without the mention of September 11th? 9/11 of course also contributed to the shifts not only in our political realities, but in the content of popular culture and the nature of film and media consumed by the American public. America was at war again, and as we see in Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997), media and film plays an important role in justifying warfare, and the consolidation of resources (monetary, human, or otherwise) behind the American Imperial Military Project and The War on Terror. The post-9/11 militarization of popular culture and civilian life meant movies glorifying war and military prowess, and movies that highlighted pleasure and fulfillment in technology and violence, rather than in human connection and sexual intimacy, needed to dominate our popular consciousness and take up space in our collective minds. As Lindsay Ellis states in “Movies, patriotism, and cultural amnesia: tracing pop culture’s relationship to 9/11”:

The appropriation of 9/11-evoking imagery in big-budget action slaughterhouses like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016) has become something of a punchline in its shamelessness, but the pervasiveness of that imagery remains fairly constant when a film’s budget allows. And these films make money because, on some level, these images are what we, the viewing audience, want to see. Like a victim of a heinous assault returning to the scene of the crime, but viewing it only from a safe distance, we keep reliving the moment over and over, until finally we find some meaning.¹¹

Is it any wonder then that the movie that launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as we know it today came out during the height of our war with Iraq? Iron Man was released in May 2008 and filming for it began in the early days of 2007. As Benedict writes:

Those perfect bodies exist only for the purpose of inflicting violence upon others. To have fun is to become weak, to let your team down, and to give the enemy a chance to win, like Thor did when he got fat in Avengers: Endgame (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2019).¹²

Fat Thor in Avengers: Endgame (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2019)

The sex scene and the hyper-mediated world 

But it’s not just that the cinematic landscape and film industry at large have shifted to leave little room for sex in film. The modes through which we consume such media have shifted as well — our relationship with film, media, and art has changed as technologies have evolved, and indeed, the very nature of our existence in the world has shifted to an increasingly isolated and alienated one.

As the unfettered market lurches forward, with the technocracy driving its impulses and makeup, the proliferation of technologies has led to an increasingly mediated, hyper-surveilled existence as normal. J.P. Telotte discusses director Paul Verhoeven’s work in relation to French cultural theorist, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher, Paul Virilio. In Telotte’s piece “Verhoeven, Virilio, and ‘Cinematic Derealization,’” he argues that the postmodern man, or who we could now call the “capitalist realist” thanks to Mark Fisher, finds himself in a kind of constantly cinematic reality cultivated by and inured to the technologies that have become quotidian and instrumental to our existence under late capitalism. In all cases, “because of the distant, detached ways in which they promote our seeing, these technologies foster as Virilio puts it, ‘the accident of reality itself,’ a pervasive sense of ‘derealization,’”¹³ and it is this derealization that removes us from emotional, sensorial, corporeal engagement with that which we perceive.

It’s this derealization that has severed our desire and stomped out our appetite for media and art that implicates our participation on a bodily level, including most prominently, the sex scene. In this derealized landscape, we can only engage with the world as a series of commodities, as products, as inputs into the steady stream of artifacts and images we consume, leaving the sensate experience of our understanding of these things completely out of the picture. “Artifacts” is used intentionally here, in the sense that complex, emotional, physical, and psychic experiences and ideas — messy material and political realities — lose all of their constituent meaning and human implication within an overly mediated context, and become mere signifiers of that which was formerly materially imperative. There is no need for the body, the soul, the heart; “in this artificial environment human senses […] seem far less important, precise or even reliable”¹⁴.

If the body has become irrelevant, if human connection has merely become a kind of mediated digital exchange of symbols, then it stands to reason the appetite for depiction of intensely corporeal experiences that break the viewer from this detached position where the body is suppressed — like a sex scene, take for example the very specific example of the much-discussed pool sex scene in Verhoeven’s Showgirls — would become an allergy to a consuming public. It comes with no surprise then that a recurring cycle of discourse online is the question of “the necessity” (or as many argue, lack thereof) of the sex scene. One merely has to search the phrase “sex scene unnecessary” on Twitter to find countless results of posts and replies on the topic, often reaching incendiary tenors. Jacques Lacan’s theories on schizophrenia provide an “evocative aesthetic model” for understanding the audience’s aversion to the presence of sex scenes. As Fredric Jameson writes in Postmodernism and the Consumer Society, “Lacanian schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure unrelated presents in time”¹⁵.

When the “consumer-spectator” encounters an image, an idea, a sound that goes beyond a mere signifier, they can not make sense of it, in fact they refuse to.

It is a revolving door of commodification and alienation — commodification of ideas, of bodies, of feelings, and alienation from ourselves, from our own bodies, from others. The way we consume and talk about films and art in this hyper-mediated environment (largely on individualized and individuated digital platforms) has not only impacted how that media and art is made (the modes of production), but also what types of media and art get prioritized (what gets made at all). Can it be talked about in 240 characters? Can it be distilled down into an easily digestible, uncomplicated binary deciphered in the millisecond of a scroll? Or better yet, can it be made into a meme? In this sense, it’s not surprising that a large portion of Gen Z¹⁶ and Millennials are the ones primarily expressing their aversion to the presence of sex scenes in films with discourse on social media; they are the ones “for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital microslices”. Indeed, “teenagers process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to read — slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net mobile magazine informational plane”¹⁷.

The constant connection to the matrix, as it were, to a mediated existence, has born a kind of Puritanism that comes with the knowledge that you are constantly being surveilled, documented, that you are constantly in public in some way, being perceived, even when you are in your private space. This is what “distinguishes current youth from generations past; just the sense that you can’t opt out at any point, because your social life is going on at all times whether or not you’re around.”¹⁸.

The unregulated market forces that drive late capitalism depend entirely on this process of turning all acts, all aspects of existence into a consumer exercise, they depend entirely on our willingness to suppress the body, the very material nature of our existence in the world and our connection to others, and assign all cultural objects and experiences a monetary value, effectively emptying out the possibility of bodily implication and engagement from our experience with art and media. There is no place for the sex scene here – especially for the kind of ecstatic, corporeal sex scenes the erotic thrillers of the 90s were filled with. Fisher is invaluable in our understanding on this point:

In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts…and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics…this turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism.¹⁹

If we are anything at all anymore, we are mostly (only) conspicuous consumers, and our position as such necessitates that all that we interact with must exist as a commodity, and the more determined our existences become on consumption, the more isolated and individuated our experiences become. Conspicuous consumption has come to replace the same kind of release and euphoria that comes with an orgasm. The plane of consumerism is where we experience all things now. Why engage in the messy matter of physical desire at all when my body has become a commodity itself that I can display and sell on Instagram and TikTok? Benedict again illuminates this twisted shift perfectly:

A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy. It, too, is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets. Our bodies are investments, which must always be optimized to bring us… what, exactly? Some vague sense of better living? Is a life without bread objectively better than a life with it? When we were children, did we dream of counting every calorie and logging every step?…Now, we are perfect islands of emotional self-reliance, and it is seen as embarrassing and co-dependent to want to be touched…There is no promise of intimacy. Like our heroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, like Rico and Dizzy and all the other infantry in Starship Troopers, we are horny only for annihilation.²⁰

Rico in Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997)

As we float, astronautically through an increasingly mediated world, ever-detached from the corporeal and emotional realities not only of others, but of ourselves, we seek pleasure only in the form of the pristine spectacle of consumption — the ecstatic high that comes not from the touch of another human, but the dopamine rush of a retweet, the serotonin hit that comes with recognizing a character or symbol from your childhood, the euphoria of knowing a thing immediately and uncomplicatedly, the bliss of having the world at your fingertips and being able to curate an experience where you are never challenged, never forced into the discomfort of engaging actively, never shaken from your position as passive consumer. No, there’s no need for sex scenes here, folks.

The sex scene and the “political”, “moral” theatrical experience

This shifting landscape of increasing technological influence on our hyper-mediated daily lives has functionally changed the way we engage with media and art. But what is the emotional motivation to recede into our caverns of consumption? What are we running from? What are we seeking to escape?

The current state of cultural and material decline plays an important role in the shift toward Puritanism in media and art, in consumer appetite, and in the political posture of the State. That is to say, with the compounding crises we are bombarded with (everything from climate disaster to rampant racialized police violence to genocide) as a part of our daily lives under late capitalism, the need for escape, and indeed, the need for that escape to be completely unchallenging and non-confrontational, has become imperative. Moreover, as control over our own material realities becomes less and less feasible, the last lone place we believe we can exercise agency is within the landscape of that which we consume. This has resulted in the consuming public approaching all media and art with a moral imperative — that which we consume must be perfectly virtuous, sanitized of all problematic or complicated ideas and depictions, because it has become the stand-in for our very realities, our very political action as citizens; consuming has become our praxis.

This is another factor in the disappearance of sex scenes, and those films that more frequently featured such scenes in the 1980s and 1990s, namely erotic thrillers, are finding less and less space (and credibility [read: capital generation]) in Hollywood. As noted by Karina Longworth, who has dedicated several episodes of her podcast “You Must Remember This” to the topic of sex in 80s and 90s Hollywood cinema²¹,

I think there is a lot of fear in the culture right now about dealing with all of the issues surrounding sex between men and women. We’ve never come close to resolving most of the imbalances and inequalities that charge a lot of these movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s and I think we’re uncomfortable with the lack of progress. I also think that the best of these movies are somewhat ambiguous as to what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘normal’ or ‘not normal,’ which is true to human nature but doesn’t jibe with a strain in our culture that wants to pretend that anything they don’t approve of or don’t feel comfortable with doesn’t exist.²²

The desire to exclusively engage with media and art made by “unproblematic” artists is a direct result of Americans viewing media consumption as an inherently political act because that is the supreme promise of Western prosperity and the religion of consumerism, and because it’s seemingly all that’s left. We’ve been stripped and socialized out of any real political energy and agency. Our ability to consume is the only thing remaining that’s “ours” in late capitalism, and as a result it’s become a stand-in for (or perhaps the sole defining quality of) every aspect of being alive today — consuming is activism, it’s love, it’s thinking, it’s sex, it’s fill in the blank. When the act of consuming is all you have left and indeed the only thing society tells you is valuable and meaningful, the act must necessarily be a moral one, which is why people send themselves down manic spirals deciding what, who is “problematic” or not, because for us the stakes are that high now.

Telotte’s reflection is again helpful here. In a derealized existence, completely untethered from one another, but forever tethered to the digital informational magazine of faux-reality, we seek anchorage in our ability to judge that which we perceive, that which we consume, those commodities that for us have become the last bastion of political and personal expression. In the

liminal position in which we find ourselves in such a derealized context…[films] suggest our need to find an anchor, a posture, and ultimately a judgment we — rather than our media — can make on such a problematic world.²³

The consumer-spectator is convinced that the very act of judging is what proves one’s participation in society, and moreover, the certitude of our own individual virtue, separate and apart from others who are ostensibly heathens if they are in disagreement with us. Art, media, film — all commodities in fact — are there to affirm our moral rectitude, we believe, not to challenge it; they must serve as an expression of who we are. Fisher cites Žižek on this matter noting that

capitalist ideology in general…consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief — in the sense of inner subjective attitude — at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior.²⁴

This is why the demands for a subjective moral purity (which we believe to be “objective”) of all that we consume is mandatory for us. Sex, desire, sexuality, therefore, is drained of its impact, detached from its ideological and sensorial consequence, and “turned into one more overly determined spectacle which we are invited to watch with detached interest and without fear that any disturbing ideological questions might arise”²⁵.

It should be noted that discussion around sex in movies is not a new one, and indeed, even when the erotic thriller genre was at its peak, films like Basic Instinct and Showgirls were still somewhat subversive, transgressive, and even anti-establishment, and were met with hostility critically and by audiences as a result, despite being prolific and profitable. This certainly speaks to our puritanical origins as Americans and the societal shame we have around sex, particularly in public or artistic settings, but in the 80s and 90s, there was still a broader desire to give in to the very natural urges and desires we all have as sexual beings. In Kurt Schiller’s incredible piece for Blood Knife Magazine, “Suck, Fuck, Kill: The psychosexual nightmare of the erotic thriller” he illuminates,

And this is where the visual explicitness of the erotic thriller comes into play. Even at the height of their popularity, contemporary reviews frequently lambasted these films for their more gratuitous tendencies—desperate, sweaty, and above all prolonged sex scenes that play out in feverish permutations and exotic locales. But it is exactly this over-the-top eroticism that allows the genre to so deeply connect with audiences. Just as the protagonists of Call Me (Sollace Mitchell, 1988) and Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987) find themselves simultaneously tantalized by and terrified of their own sexual appetites, the audience is similarly left both titillated and alienated. […] Like the characters on screen, we are both caught up in the passion, and terrified at the potential consequences and ramifications.²⁶

To most movie-going audiences, sex in movies now feels “imposed,” its mere presence feels like an affront, a confrontation, which is precisely what a filmmaker like Verhoeven is after in movies like Showgirls or more recently Benedetta (2021), and precisely what audiences are allergic to, which is very precisely why he does what he does. Shouldn’t sex be a provocation? In 2022, The New Yorker organized a roundtable of critics tasked with examining the absence of sex scenes in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Paradoxically, despite The New Yorker’s critics expressing a longing for sex scenes in films, their stance is not too dissimilar from that of those audiences who reject such scenes today. For example, on the sex in Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Alexandra Schwartz says, “It felt superimposed, like a point was being made rather than it being anything integral to the movie”²⁷. Words that seem to confirm what Verhoeven has asserted about the drift towards Puritanism in American cinema today, and its indifference or impatience toward the kind of stories and images that have always interested him throughout his career. In this regard, it is not surprising that his latest work, and the focus of much of The New Yorker’s critics’ ire, Benedetta, is a French film distributed in the United States by a French media corporation. Verhoeven had to go to Europe to make his art.

A sex scene in Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

This hostility within The New Yorker’s roundtable is continued as they try to parse out what “the point” of the sex scenes in HBO’s Euphoria (created by Sam Levinson, 2019-present) is, lamenting that it feels again like the show is simply being exhibitionist, simply saying “look how far we can go.” The issue is that the presence of sex that is not easily digestible and sanitized for these viewers, sex that can not be swallowed whole or viewed as morally correct in some way, is therefore automatically seen as “anti-art”, as without having meaning, as alienating. At the same time, these critics talk about how they “can’t look away” from the sex scenes in Euphoria, which reveals to us that there is clearly something working viscerally about these scenes that the viewers have become unaccustomed to, that they meet with suspicion rather than interest and curiosity. This perspective is one that can be applied broadly to any element of film and TV that directly engages a viewer and forces them to actively participate in what they’re watching, rather than just passively swallow it without feeling or thinking; these scenes are met with contempt.

And here we find the crux of this puritanical stance toward sex in films and media, which is the assertion that sex can not simply exist in film or TV, that it must serve some greater purpose in order to be considered “art” and not “porn,” that there must be some higher political and ideological meaning behind it, that sex depicted simply for pleasure (the pleasure of the characters and the pleasure of the audiences) or sex depicted to provoke, to stimulate, to confront viewers, is inherently “anti-art” and automatically seen as problematic. Doreen St. Felix from The New Yorker goes on,

The question is: was that the only thing that you did? Sometimes Euphoria makes me want to use a word that I basically never use in daily life, which is ‘sexist.’ It seems, so often, that in its interest in awakening the figure of the provocateur — which I think is totally legit and reasonable, so much of our culture right now is really earnest and de-sexed — the show has just made these women really retrograde figures.²⁸

What’s retrograde is arguing that women (or anyone for that matter) having sex and being overtly sexual (for any reason or no reason at all), even and especially when they are the ones being agent about their sexuality, is somehow retrograde. The automatic assumption that sex, sexuality, desire, bodily experience and expression as a major part of a woman’s (or any person’s) life and perhaps core to understanding her is not valid in and of itself and must instead serve some kind of moral or political purpose, is a vehement expression of this puritanical stance, and furthermore, supports the broader capitalist perspective that sex only exists for pro-creation and the production of new workers — that sex for pleasure, and indeed pleasure itself, is inherently anti-capital. These critics (and audiences today generally speaking) are only interested in a sanitized, moralized, and ideally, completely non-controversial experience with their media and art, an experience they readily commodify into an easily digestible opinion (or tweet, meme, headline) to exist as an artifact online, one that’s representative and reflective of their personal political and moral ideologies. They want a film (just like any other commodity they consume) to stand as a totem, a badge, for their specific belief system rather than challenge it (or not serve as representative at all). While these critics claim to be clamoring for the resurgence of the sex scene, they’re in fact affirming the perspective that is reflective of its demise and of audiences’ aversion to sex in film and media more broadly.

A sex scene in HBO’s Euphoria (Sam Levinson, 2019-present)

Naomi Fry continues,

They’re all idiots. I mean, they’re not idiots in terms of their baseline intelligence, but they’re all body and sensation and impulse. And arguably that’s what you need for a teen show, maybe, but it’s also what you need for porn. You watch porn for a reason, and it’s not to watch people talk about books.²⁹

This is the grand summation of the morally conservative posture that the proliferation of mediated experiences and the market-making of all aspects of our existence has reinforced: that sex, experiences of the body (both their depiction and our bodily engagement — our emotional and sensorial engagement — as viewers with film and media), that impulse and desire, are automatically seen is less than, as unintelligent, as unworthy of depiction, as unworthy of our attention outside of a pornographic setting.

And then comes the matter at the heart of it all, as Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker asks,

What is this sex for? And ‘to make people horny’ is not enough, so you have to try to stylize and sort of auteurize the act.³⁰

Do we? Or do we just require that in order for it to feel more comfortable to consume? Do we require that sex be “auteurized” and “statement making” so that it can serve as a ready hologram of our own personal moralized beliefs?

What if the provocation is the point? What if the lack of a moral aestheticization of sex is the point? What if the stirring of desire and curiosity in the catatonic consumer-spectator is the point? What if the expression and experience of pleasure on its own terms is the point? Is that not a worthy exercise, particularly amid such a hollowed out, highly mediated and surveilled existence — an existence where we are thoroughly deprived of pleasure and self-expression, where it has become harder and harder to simply survive let alone experience true, deep, unmediated pleasure and ecstasy that is not tied to some consumer act? Sex is a part of life, a very material part of our humanity, our experience with the real, so why shouldn’t it be in films? Sex (and the sex scene) is a place where provocation, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, desire, curiosity, messiness, nuance, spectacle, and equally, banality, and all of life’s ambiguities, beauties, and perversions can exist at once. But it requires creation and engagement beyond passive consumption and reflexive, flattened regurgitation.

It’s fitting then we find ourselves back where we started — with Verhoeven, the arbiter of satire and confrontational cinema, the director who reminds us that he (and we) “can go there” as Alexandra Schwartz chided. The director who works against the commodification of sex and violence, against the commodification of the entirety of our lived experiences, by forcing us to confront the very spectacle of commodification in the first place. Verhoeven, in doing so, asserts the necessity of resisting those market impulses that seek to destroy the experience and relevance of the body, that seek to render our bodies as blunt investments, as mere tools for capital generation. In movies like Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Benedetta, Verhoeven refuses to offer us a sanitized, detached act made up of a series of signifiers, but instead shows us the messiness of our existence, a fully realized confrontation with the ideological and material constraints under which we live. He calls attention to the absurd ugliness inherent in the commodification of our bodies and our sensuality. He is in this way, serving as a forcing mechanism for us to confront our own feelings and desires we may want to otherwise avoid, and he’s doing so within the very mediums we turn to for escape from those frictions.

Telotte describes Verhoeven’s impulses expressed in Starship Troopers with an understanding that one could apply more broadly to the project of his films in general, as “intent on exaggerating its effects, its conventions, its very lures in order to throw us into a state of irresolution, and force us to explore the premises”³¹ from which violence, sex, pleasure, pain and our cinematic visions of it proceed.

But why does any of this matter? What’s lost when movies just become a series of memeable one-liners and action scenes that can be distilled down into a gif? What’s lost when the necessary implication of the audience in the experience of viewing a film is removed and we become merely passive consumers of moving images that stir nothing in us, that don’t engage our bodies, our hearts, our minds, or shake us from our late capitalist catatonia? Why does it matter that we now only interact with trauma narratives through prepackaged IP nuggets delivered to us neatly in a series like WandaVision (created by Jac Schaeffer, 2021), or the Halloween franchise? What’s lost when the sex scene disappears from our movies, when the very presence of sexual desire and bodily expression incites revulsion? What’s lost is our connection to one another beyond the fetters of capitalism, indeed the very thing that makes us human. What’s lost is our “sense of the real” (Telotte), the visceral and radical experiences that Verhoeven’s Hollywood films, even and especially through the persistence and abundance of sex scenes, were dedicated to recovering, all of which today’s cinema is inevitably without. What’s lost is the last thing that stands between us and the system that forever seeks to turn us into nothing more than another product.

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