Sex and "The Kids"

[lillibet]

Jason and I recently saw The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko's film about the children of a lesbian couple finding the sperm donor who is their natural father. We really enjoyed it--it's one of the best depictions of marriage that I've ever seen on screen and the acting is fantastically unstudied.

As it happens, we had just watched one of Cholodenko's previous films, Laurel Canyon a week earlier. One of the things I noticed in both movies is that while the flirtations have a lot of chemistry, the actual sex scenes are frenetic and pretty joyless.

I think the problem with them is that they are very realistic. There's no soft lighting, the camera doesn't avoid the physical truth of aging bodies or the awkwardness of fitting all those arms and legs in one bed. There's not a lot of gasping and moaning--except for breath. The oral sex scenes are hidden by blankets, but they don't shy away from the potential for tedium. This is what sex really looks like.

And isn't that a good thing? Maybe the expectations that the media create are so unrealistic that it's good to have scenes that show how un-sexy sex can be. I haven't spent much time watching other people have sex--with rare exceptions I've followed Zero Mostel's timeless advice "Say 'oops!' and get out!" I've never been interested in filming myself in action, but I'm sure I don't look any better than Julianne Moore.

So why do these scenes feel so strange and wrong? Have I just swallowed the kool-aid and come to believe that sex is--or at least can be--a heart-stoppingly sexy thing? I think the problem is that what these scenes are showing us is only what it looks like. No, there aren't fireworks going off overhead, nor shooting stars (with one memorable exception) but when I have sex, my mind envelops the act in sexiness. It's magical because I believe in the magic. It doesn't matter what it looks like; in order for it to be believable, it needs to convey something of what it feels like. Otherwise the sex scenes end up ruining the mood.

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

This is related to my perplexity about why some books get translated to movies -- those books where the internal voice/perspective of the viewpoint character is a major part of the point. Flowers for Algernon, for example, which I've seen both screen and stage versions of. The entire point of that story, as far as I'm concerned, is the way the character's perception of the world around him, his place in that world, and how others see him, changes as his intelligence changes. If I'm watching it from the outside, sure, I can see how his manner and behavior change, but I don't see the world filtered through his interpretation.

Similarly, watching sex just isn't the same experience as having sex, or even "watching" sex through reading a first-person narrative about it. It's not about what it looks like, it's about what it feels like.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of good fiction puts an imaginative gloss on reality. Real conversations have not only a lot of banality, but a lot of "uh" and repetition and sentences that go around in circles and trail off. But our voices on tape recorders don't sound like our voices in our heads - and our conversations when transcribed by a mercilessly accurate transcription service don't sound like how we imagine our conversations to go, either.

Sometimes this leads to weirdnesses like TV programs that have no bathrooms, or the whole "Everyone, especially women, is really good looking" aspect of the media, but in smaller doses I think it's okay.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

Sex isn't, usually, an arty thing. I've watched a few "training" films for aspiring sex therapists (psychologists) with running commentary from the man who made them (Joe LoPiccolo, who was a pioneer in the area of behavioral retraining for treating sexual disorders.) When I was not laughing, or busily observing the treatment details, I was pretty bored.

And the one and only time I saw myself having sex (in a mirror, in a tiny hotel room), I started laughing so hard that we had to stop. What a ridiculous activity!

(Sidenote: Joe's stories OTOH were great -- like when they advertised for actors for these films, they got a wide range of women, almost all amateur mainstream actresses, but only "porn pro" men with big penises. Or the case of the "sexually abused" woman, where she and her husband sought sex therapy because he was -- not deliberately -- hurting her during sex, and she would be covered with bruises. It turned out that her husband had absolutely no sense of proprioception; he literally didn't know where his body was in relation to other things. When they came into Joe's office, he walked right into this gigantic potted rubber tree that Joe had. The man had a very rare medical problem that caused the problem.)

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Clicking on the link gets intercepted by IMDB, which instructs me to re-enter the link and the reload. I've never seen a web site block linking like this - what's going on here?

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

That is bizarre. It's doing the same thing for me. There doesn't seem to be anything special about the URLs. I wonder if it's a temporary thing or some link-busting strategy they're trying. Weird. Sorry if that's annoying.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I started experimenting with my own links (I was especially wondering if it had something to do with blocking the LJ link-intercept middleman thing). It does seem to be movie-specific, as none of the other ones I tested did the intercept. I wondered if it was "adult" content, but my other tests didn't trigger it. (Not that I could get IMDB to pull up any of the titles I think of as explicitly "porn" - either they don't have them, or there's some "yes, really, show me" setting I didn't find.)
http://web.mit.edu/boojum/www/test.html

(This is kind of a digression from your original post, though - sorry!)

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

No worries--that is really odd.

[minkrose]

It started happening lately - it's related to LJ taking vendor credit for links that you post. I think they said they fixed it, but they didn't really? I wasn't keeping up very closely.

It's some tricky bit of code that's messing up link forwarding. IMDb links haven't worked properly from LJ in months.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I was also suspicious of the vendor credit redirection, and I had thought that I had ruled out it being LJ-specific with my test page, but I now realize it was probably a browser cache issue on my end, having cached the "reload this" image. Oops.

Maybe IMDB is catching everything coming from that redirection site on purpose, though then I wonder how they're being annoyed by it.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

I dunno, but I think that when I have sex it's very unrealistic.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I would imagine that if I were to start seeing in my own sex scenes what a camera would see, there's something going horribly wrong in my head such that I'm not particularly engaged or invested. For me, as a participant, I see and experience what the camera can't and can't see what the camera would. Sure, I'm aware of the flab and zits and farts and elbow in eye--'oops, sorry!'--but they're no more an important part of the sex as an errant boom-mic would be.

Perhaps I'm trying to say that I think the difference between sex-on-film and sex-in-life is the difference between a cell-phone-snap-shot and an oil-painting of the same landscape. To capture what sex "looks like" you just need a camera; to capture what it "*is* like" you need an artist. [be that an artist with a brush or an artist with a camera]. The trend toward "realism" in film reminds me of "photo-realism" in painting, and in most cases it's really just not my thing because it tells too little of the whole story.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

This is what sex really looks like.

Um...not sure how to say this, but speaking as someone who has seen many of her friends joyfully having sex, on both sides of the Pond, I can report that sex (that I've watched) *can* be magical and heart-stoppingly sexy for the viewer. It's not only in the mind. And apparently in the movies mentioned above it's not in the video shots either.

I'm less inclined to watch the movie if all it shows is drudgery. ;-/ But I'll still watch it, I think, because I'm sure that it's entertaining in other ways.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes--it's a wonderful movie in many (even most) ways. There's just a couple of scenes where there was all this lead in and then just bouncy-bouncy-bouncy.

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

I don't know where they got the info, but on last weekend's NPR news quiz show
"Wait Wait Don't Tell Me", they mentioned that researchers are saying that movies are giving people unrealistic views about what a normal relationship should be.

(I wish they'd provide links to the articles referenced in their show on their website)

[mangosteen]

All of this goes to show that sex is a "you had to be there" kind of experience.

[minkrose]

I'm glad you posted this review! I was suspiciously optimistic about this movie - it looked like something I would really enjoy but I don't trust advertising.

I think it's playing at the belmont theatre down the street, so maybe I'll see it soon!

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I think you'd find a lot to love about it. And hey, Belmont Theatre down the street--how cool is that?!

[muffyjo]

Sex is one of the few things that works best when you stay right in the middle of the moment. It almost forces you to let go of all the judgment pieces so you can really enjoy it. It keeps you in the present in a way that very few other things in your life can do.