PrintTo properly prepare for this article, I sat though a number of sex scenes from a variety of sources: from my DVD collection’s dust-covered sleeves, I watched parts of movies I haven’t seen or thought about in years—Cold Mountain, for example—and parts of movies I’ve seen over and over, like Amélie. I braved the bowels of the Internet to watch scenes from movies I’ve never seen or don’t own. Some of them were good, albeit uncomfortably realistic, such as in Fish Tank; some of them were very well-done, as in My Own Private Idaho; and some were hilariously awful, like the excessively slowed-down scene in 300. All together, they made a bizarre collage of nudity, soft lighting, and in the case of Idaho, a sudden cut to an unexplained yet gleefully on-the-nose shot of a dilapidated barn falling from the sky onto an abandoned road at one character’s moment of climax.
Sex scenes get put in movies for a variety of reasons, but in Hollywood, conventional wisdom holds that a particularly steamy sex scene will lure more people into the theater. Yet a recent University of California, Davis study that examined movies released between 2001 and 2005, found the opposite: sex in movies does not sell. This past year, for example, only six of the top 20 highest-grossing films had any significant sexual content, and not one of them featured a bona fide sex scene. Movies advertised primarily for their action sequences, like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Avatar, fared much better, and counted for nine films out of the top 20.
But the studios seem to have not figured this out yet, and it’s their continued belief in the power of the sex scene that leads to a situation like the one in Watchmen. Nearly every review of the film singled out the sex scene as the film’s low point, and laypeople largely agree—Suzanne Walker, a sophomore in BC, remarked of the scene, “It’s like, let’s do a terrible interpretive dance to ‘Hallelujah,’ and make it about sex.” Director Zack Snyder employs nearly all of the traditional techniques that have characterized sex scenes in studio film in the last 20 years: mood music, soft lighting, and lingering close-ups of the actors’ faces. In some instances, using some or all of these tropes can work effectively—the sensual library scene in Atonement, for instance—but scenes that employ all of them always ring slightly false. Watchmen is an example of a director pushing a sex scene so far into already-charted territory that it plays like a parody. When Watchmen is juxtaposed with a film like (500) Days of Summer that smartly sidesteps a sex scene by focusing instead on the protagonist’s morning-after bliss, it’s hard not to wonder why most sex scenes exist at all.
One contributing factor to the continuing presence of the sex scene is the fact that sex scenes continue to be some of the most-discussed elements of cinema in the media. This past year, aside from the finances of the film, it has been the sex scene that director James Cameron cut out of Avatar that has attracted the most attention. In 2008, scenes in The Reader, in which Kate Winslet’s character seduces a 15-year-old boy, sparked controversy. Despite the fact that the sex in The Reader was not particularly graphic, and the young actor is post-pubescent, the scenes made audiences squeamish. Even the most convincingly erotic sex scenes can be uncomfortable to watch in a theater full of strangers. According to Ellen Walkington, another BC sophomore, “that’s when you start looking for other people’s reactions” in the theater. This awkwardness is also a result of the guilt audiences can’t help but feel whenever they are made voyeurs to a particularly private moment —as Walker puts it, “I try to imagine movies are as close to real life as possible… But in real life, you never watch other people having sex. It feels wrong.” This sense of intrusion probably factors into society’s collective fixation with sex in the movies.
Though I don’t remember the first sex scene I saw, possibly in Chicago, I do distinctly remember one a few years later: When I was 15, several friends and I snuck into the R-rated Brokeback Mountain, explicitly against our parents’ wishes. The sex scene between Heath Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar and Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist was the most controversial part of the movie and, of course, the subject of endless media coverage.
I was not a rebellious teenager, and had never seen an R-rated movie in theaters before. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, but it was not what ended up being in the movie. As sex scenes go, it is fairly tame: for its ninety-second duration, the screen is fairly dark and both parties remain almost entirely clothed. I was, frankly, disappointed that all of the brouhaha had been over nothing.
Going back now and watching that scene again is an interesting experiment in light of all of the movies I have seen since. It is about as far from the scene in Watchmen as sex scenes get: there is no music and the film cuts only once during the actual act. During the press tour for the movie, director Ang Lee told the San Francisco Chronicle that he thought, “Some people will see the sex scene as pretty bland, but for others it will be too heavy. For me, it’s just right.” Brokeback Mountain is a story about sexual repression: if the viewers do not observe first-hand the intensely sexual nature of the relationship between the two men, they cannot understand the rest of the movie. That no-frills scene is the fulcrum on which the entire story turns.
The library tryst in Atonement, between Robbie and Cecilia, serves the same function. Robbie spends the rest of the film trying to get back to Cecilia, and as he suffers through the unthinkable horrors of the Second World War, his love for her is the only thing keeping him alive. The sex scene in the library—the culmination of his passion—drives Robbie for the rest of his life, and the chemistry of the scene is what makes that drive understandable.
There are a number of factors that determine the quality of a sex scene in a movie. The scene in Watchmen, for instance, fails because of poor artistic choices made by the director. But on the most basic level, sex scenes are good if they are essential to the stories their movies are trying to tell, as with the emotion that drives the plot in Atonement. They may make us uncomfortable, but if they are good, they also feel right.