We are witnessing a fascinating transatlantic cultural exchange at the moment, one that reveals just how deep the divide between Europe and the United States has become on a crucial issue: sex.
With films such as Kinsey and Inside Deep Throat, America is offering us a historical perspective on the origins of the sexual revolution of the past half-century, much of which happened in the USA. These two films show how radically our understanding of sexuality has changed in the past 50 years, and how profoundly our depiction of it has altered, too.
On the other hand, with films such as the British director Michael Winterbottom’s extremely explicit 9 Songs, which is released in the UK next week and in the United States in summer, Europeans are offering the kind of unvarnished depiction of sex in relationships that American film-makers, with few exceptions, seem unwilling or unable to explore at the moment. It is clear that Europeans and Americans now think very differently about sex and about how they are willing to explore it on screen.
Kinsey, released on Friday in the UK, has provoked uproar in America, with conservatives railing against Kinsey the scientist for providing what they believe is a pseudo- scientific justification for the ills of the sexual revolution and against the film for characterising him as a heroic, if flawed, sexual liberator. “For more than 50 years, Kinsey’s ‘research’ has served to systematically undermine the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic that has guided western civilisation for centuries,” wrote S Michael Craven, of the conservative National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families.
Inside Deep Throat, which premiered recently at the Berlin film festival and will be released in the UK this summer, is a documentary about Deep Throat, the first hard-core pornographic film to find a mainstream audience on its release in 1972. Surprisingly, there has been less controversy surrounding the release of the documentary (which is being distributed by Universal Pictures, one of the major Hollywood studios), perhaps because the sex in Deep Throat seems quaint by the standards of today’s brutalising pornography. Still, plans to release the original film in a double bill had to be postponed when the distributors could not find a lab prepared to make new prints.
“There was almost a genuine, innocent curiosity about pornography, about sex and sexuality (back then),” says Randy Barbato, who directed the documentary with Fenton Bailey. “It’s almost like Deep Throat and its commercial success was the beginning of pornography being co-opted by big business, the commodification of sex.”
Yet watching Inside Deep Throat only highlights the astonishing gulf between what tens of millions of Americans, in red states and blue, now devour in the privacy of their homes — hard-core pornography — and what they can see about sex in cinemas. “Pornography has never been so available and graphic at any time in history as it is in America today,” says the film critic Roger Ebert. “You can get it on any home computer, any TV, at any five-star hotel. Yet adults can’t go to a movie theatre and see realistic and complex explorations of sex.”
In the current climate, just as in the 1950s and 1960s, inquisitive Americans are forced to seek out art-house showings of foreign films that deal with sex. Films such as Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanité, Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi, Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell and Sex Is Comedy, Bernardo Berto-lucci’s The Dreamers, David Mackenzie’s Young Adam and Alfonso Cuaron’s Y tu mama tambien are taking American audiences to places their own film- makers are too scared to go. In fact, with the impending release of 9 Songs, American audiences will get their most forthright view of sex in a film screened in mainstream, if mainly art-house, cinemas since Deep Throat. It will be fascinating to see their reaction.
“Some recent American films have sex in them, but it’s hard to name any recent American films that have sex as their subject,” says Laura Bickford, the producer of the Oscar-winning Traffic. “Americans are scared of sex. The sexual freedom of the 1960s didn’t really stick. Yet when you think about the way girls go around dressed today, it’s weird. It’s such a contradiction: teenagers dress showing their thongs and bras, but God forbid you have any real sex in a film. Every actress is selling sex, everybody in Hollywood wants to be an object of sexual desire, but nobody actually wants to be involved in showing sex on film.”
Of course, today’s American cinema reflects the broader issues at stake in US culture, which seems frozen in the headlights of the radical conservative assault from the powerful Christian evangelical movement. The government’s Federal Communications Commission has imposed huge fines on TV networks — for the brief appearance of Janet Jackson’s nipple a year ago, for example — and on radio, for not reining in some of the shock jock Howard Stern’s sexual excesses. The climate has become so hysterical that just after the November election, one broadcaster felt obliged to blur a baby’s bottom in a family TV show. And the ABC network pulled Saving Private Ryan off the air in 66 cities because it was worried that profanity in the film could open it up to huge FCC fines. With the ascendant cultural values of the red states reflected in George W Bush’s re-election, almost any explicit depiction of sexuality in the mainstream American media seems verboten.
“I can think of few places, with the possible exception of Victorian England, where people were more bipolar in their attitudes towards sexuality than in America today,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “We are a country more obsessed with sex than any other, and a nation more embarrassed by it than any other. You can go back to the founding of this nation: the early puritan settlers had some extraordinarily conflicted attitudes about sex, which are still apparent today.”
Yet Thompson believes that the conservative crusade against the depiction of sex is likely to fail. As he points out, the FCC’s fines on Stern have had the effect of forcing him off the broadcast airwaves (regulated by the FCC), onto satellite radio (which is not), much as more explicit content has been forced off broadcast television onto cable. “When the forces of righteous indignation go up against the forces of the marketplace,” he says, “like all other things in this country, the marketplace usually gets its way.”
