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In the Diyala Province of northeast Baghdad an influential parochial group practices Salafism, a restrictive form of Islam that severely rejects modernity, where grocers are prohibited from placing tomatoes—the specter of femininity—in proximity to cucumbers. And there’s absolutely no display of bananas, whatsoever.
Such is the parallel universe to which we flee in going to the movies, suspending our collective disbelief almost as easily as believing that what we see on screen is real. Any relationship between reality and its cinematic Doppelgänger gets muddled in no small way, that's true. But whatever fuels our entertainment drives Hollywood and forces audiences to confront their lust...not for sex but for violence.
The slash-and-thrill R-rated “torture porn” like Saw (2004) and it’s spawn are uncomfortable to watch but fulfills the audience’s lust for voyeurism and violence, and yet seems incapable of filling the void for gut-twisting murder, no matter how vicious or vile. But if you like brutality, here it is—you can wallow in it.
In the first decade of the 21st Century, there is no cinematic dialogue in the United States on human sexuality. Nowadays, sex and nudity has largely disappeared from movie screens; and so-called "art films" are proving more courageous than bankable in what has become "a cartoon nation."
Films produced by the industry and given an R rating are either reprehensibly idiotic bone-headed comedies wherein sex serves as a punch line while insisting that males and females look pretty good semi-nude, especially when it provides ample opportunity for a nudge in the ribs and a winking smirk along with a little eyeball strain. Of course, these characters like sex…they must like it...but not too much or, like, too weird.
But nobody seems to have really gotten a handle on this thing.
Sex-positive films are rare, especially in the mainstream. But don’t blame Hollywood. This sort of thing starts in the home. Megan Rosenfeld, former reporter for The Washington Post who critiqued two books that held views on pornography, opined in her review: “These two books by young female journalists offer a depressing view of modern sexual mores in which it is increasingly acceptable for men to sit in front of their computers, watching pornography and masturbating, in lieu of having relationships with actual women, and in which women are desperately trying to please these guys by looking as much like porn stars as plastic surgery and skimpy clothing will allow.”
Audaciously pornographic, it’s almost ironic that the most financially successful motion picture in the history of American cinema was shot in 6 days for $25,000 dollars with a running time of 58 minutes—then banned in 23 states. Deep Throat (1972) grossed somewhere north of 600 million dollars. Hardly a paragon of outstanding filmmaking, what’s most extraordinary about this porno film is its affect upon the licentiously racing erotic pulse of the people who watched it. It can be said this flick had a cultural impact by its very existence; depiction of sexuality in mainstream cinema pushed boundaries in terms of what could be allowed on screen.
This unusually significant 16mm, no-budget, balls-out, ultra-visceral experience occurred as an oddly developed phenomenon that wooed critics and wowed audiences under circumstances that could only be understood by fitting the narrative into the viewer’s secret desire. Back-in-the-day, the movie (such as it is) was a hit with Baby Boomers and their parents’ generation. Even today, with boundless porn sites on the Internet, this 36-year-old film is still…ahem…an appetizer for the curious.
The thrill of what’s novel on screen (sex) and the comfort of what’s more familiar (violence), much of what gets written up by film critics and published in the mainstream media about sex is mostly negative and largely sensational, graced only by that occasion ethereal diffusion of light.  Film critics generally feel comfortably superior (if that is, in fact, possible) to the movies they review, a particularly familiar intellectual stance when it comes to sexually oriented cinema. Pulitzer-Prize-winning film critic Stephen Hunter (formerly with The Washington Post) seems gratified whenever reviewing films driven by satisfyingly violent entertainment, movies informed by their stylized weapons in the capable hands of both protagonist and nemesis, and when stuff blows up. Hunter, a Pulitzer-Prize winner, when writing about violence—guns in particular—few critics can match his love affair with weapons, reverently listing the caliber, range and impact of guns, rifles, cannons…you name it; not just precisely but lyrically.
It would seem, however, that Hunter’s eye for criticism and detail fails him miserably when posturing to describe a film driven purely by sex—where primal action involves both sex and violence. Abandoning all professionalism in reviewing Director Gaspar Noe’s grossly disturbing noir thriller Irréversible (2002, France) here, Hunter merely recalls one memorable moment in the film as a “sickening blast of rage” when a pimp’s fury turns on the rape of a woman (Monica Bellucci).
“I will not describe it,” his words squirm uncomfortably in protest, his mandate as a critic shattering into confetti. “I cannot describe it. The language won’t go there. Take it from me, however, it is not something you will want to see.” At once guileless and guarded, though his reportage had the benefit of putting potential viewer on the alert, Hunter’s essay flat-out refused to give an account of the action on screen; instead the film critic bears the burden of having to plow the potter fields of The Middle Ages.
By no small degree, Hunter critically coddles the biology of death laid out in graphic detail with the opening twenty minutes of Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), when American soldiers carrying out the allied invasion of Europe in that opening volley of World War II;
 
Human bodies dramatically brutalized en masse, engulfed by surging waves of horrific violence along the beach at Normandy, Hunter’s writing always clear and concise delivers critical details of men being savaged by bullets; he even has the knack to retain our attention when hypocrisy about his philosophy is acute.
Spielberg’s terrorist manifesto, Munich (2005) is based on a true story involving the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany. The group known as Black September murdered 11 Israeli athletes. In the aftermath, five men were chosen to eliminate the ones responsible for that slaughter. A movie fraught with bloodshed beyond the fall of grace, Hunter only toss darts at the director for daring to depict one particular, voluptuous murder over all the others, singled out. Hunter eviscerates Spielberg for conflating (perceived) sex with Hunter’s beloved violence, debunking the director’s choice to combine nudity and murder; for daring to explore zones of freedom within the story being told by depicting a single death—not because the victim is female who is shot to death in cold blood…but rather because she’s naked. Suddenly, Hunter’s irrepressible passion for seeing weapons put to fatal use and the awful damage they can do is suppressed when a woman is the one who gets shot…with her clothes off.
 John Anderson, also a free-lance writer filing for The Post, burnished his review of the Clint Eastwood-directed Changeling (2008) with his annoyance in describing a woman (Angelina Jolie) being subject to “…naked power-hosing in the psychiatric prison…” which he calls penal-system porn. “The body-cavity search she undergoes,” Anderson writes, “is excruciating and, again, borders on the pornographic, sadistic and emotionally cheap.”
A narrative portrayal of sex in the cinema is not automatically a porno film, nor should it be relegated to the primordial ooze of the Internet. Turning the zeitgeist away from the Medieval, puritanical darkness toward those faint Promethean glimmers of 21st Century enlightenment might first require freeing many enslaved by their contradictions with a national dialogue on human sexuality, and from those self-righteous film critics acting as the self-appointed wardens of America’s moral well being.
Cinema at its zenith manipulates the audience in taking that long leap of disbelief in notoriously glorifying what it projects. Film exaggerates so viewers can enlarge their identity with that of the characters while reconciling the movie and its themes with issues in their private lives, personal experiences and faded memories. As quiet as it’s kept, even Grandma and Grandpa really are “knocking boots” more often than the children and grandchildren may be willing to admit.
The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has done a lot of research on sexual attitudes and behavior of people over the age of fifty, finding that the elderly are plenty active and interested. How then might this AARP statistic be translated into movie-going entertainment for the estimated 75 million Baby Boomers (and even older) who have simply given up on Hollywood producing sexually explicit, high-end adult entertainment?
 Consensus would generally have it that the NC-17 rating is box office poison for American film producers and distributors. Filmmakers will not suffer this shibboleth gladly, and will self-censor to avoid being so benighted by resubmitting the title or by appealing the decision. More often, films are re-edited to receive the lower R rating, or producers opt to surrender their rating imposed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)’s Classification and Rating Administration (CARA) and release the film unrated to avoid the NC-17 brand.
 The American Zeitgeist has always been an imprecise creature—noble yet a little nutty—never more so than in this post-modern world of creeping skepticism, hardcore cynicism, and hydra-headed hypocrisy. Originally rated R, The Wild Bunch (1969) was resubmitted and re-rated NC-17 in 1993 even though no edits were made. Warner Bros. delayed the film’s rerelease while the decision was appealed—successfully.
Violent content nothwithstanding and with rare exception, explicit sexual activity depicted in the American mainstream cinema is the focus for this brand. Filmmakers routinely warned by CARA for pushing the boundaries are punished for challenging what is not allowed on screen.Typically, producers cower under scrutiny, editing down whatever about the film might be controversial into largely a few seconds of screen time to show nothing at all approaching lewd or lascivious. (The scenes in question usually wind up widely available on the Internet.)
LUST, CAUTION (2007) directed by Ange Lee, however, braved the stigma of the rating. And yet such boldness requires a firm girdle of moviegoer support.
Why should this film not be labeled pornographic goes directly to intent. The actors do engage in genuine levels of sexual activity, but only up to a point. Nevertheless, if grownups (actual adults) in America are  hungry and starving for non-pornographic, properly labeled movies that take risks in being politically incorrect, provoking controversy and conversation about politics, religion, race, sex and violence then filmgoers haven’t yet been lost to those culture-killing, family-friendly demagogues and media whores.
Only when "do-gooders" passing themselves off as the industry's standard-bearer (and film critics feigning outrage about what they see on screen) finally get out of the business of keeping the "tomatoes" away from the "cucumbers" and "bananas" will the de facto embargo on adult cinema be lifted so that going to the movies might feel more like living in America and not in the Diyala Province of northeast Baghdad.
By Frederick Louis Richardson
Copyright © 2008 DreaMerchant ®
All Rights Reserved
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