Sex and the Cinema

The insane haze-filled dream sequence during which Mia Farrow is impregnated by the devil in Rosemary’s Baby; close-ups of post-coital sweat-dripping skin in The Marriage of Maria Braun; ocean spray crashing against a cliff face as Mory and Anta consummate their love in Touki Bouki. These are some of my favourite sex scenes in cinema. Not by coincidence, none of them actually show any action, but instead find more visually intriguing ways to represent carnality.

This coyness is due in part to our culture’s treatment of sex as a taboo subject. Portrayals and allusions to copulation in films have historically been governed to a large degree by censorship. Hollywood’s Hays Code, which lasted from the 1930s to the 60s, banned miscegenation and onscreen kisses lasting longer than three seconds amongst its more despicable and ludicrous arbitrations.

The way artists circumvent or dance around such limitations in the images they create, though, contributes to cinema’s richness. Despite the best efforts of Will Hays and co, Hollywood became known as an institution dripping in eroticism. Studio-era filmmakers played a seductive game of cat and mouse with the censors. Directors like Alfred Hitchcock had fun using various iconographic stand-ins whenever things got steamy. His litany of disguised profanity includes a coincidental firework display illuminating the background as Cary Grant and Grace Kelly embrace in To Catch a Thief, and a train hurtling through a tunnel as Grant envelops Eva Marie Saint at the end of North by Northwest.

The petulant auteur even took the piss out of the three-second rule by having his actors – Grant and Ingrid Bergman this time – perform a lustful stop and start kiss lasting a whole scene in Notorious. Nicholas Ray, meanwhile, perfected violent dramatic showdowns in his films, which stood in for fornication and barely hid their oozing sexual tension. In Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean dances around a coiffured combatant, the pair thrusting and parrying with flick knifes, whilst Joan Crawford points her pistol evocatively at Mercedes McCambridge in subversive western Johnny Guitar. 

Our concept of camp developed largely from the codes that such filmmakers found to present the burgeoning 20th century notion of a hetero-homo divide, a topic ostensibly off limits. There are legions of gloriously sissy or butch characters littering this period of American cinema: the limp-pawed lion with a pretty red bow on his head in The Wizard of Oz and Bette Davis’s mannish, strutting dominatrix in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, to name just a couple. These manifestly queer figures bounced off straighter-playing performances, often equally as mannered in their replication of traditional male and female roles, helping create an idea of sexual choice as something simulated through appearance and behaviour.

Restrictions still exist in more recent Western filmmaking in the form of ratings systems and funding allocations. More indirect proscription prevails simply in what is deemed tasteful and acceptable by society at large. Lars von Trier easily baits conservative viewers with his porno-aesthetic games, from his first use of unsimulated sex in The Idiots to Antichrist’s sado-masochistic tendencies. Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right hides its all-female lovemaking under a duvet whilst the film’s opposite-gendered coupling is depicted in all its orgasmic glory. The works of these contemporary artists embody differing responses to the squeamishness surrounding sex acts that still permeates the movies. Watching them is somehow more satisfying than films that bare all as part of our brave new sexually liberated world. Long may censorship, sex, and cinema continue to frolic libidinously in the Hay.