Erotica In Arts. Part 5: Sex in the Movies

The story of sex in the movies is really two stories. For all practical purposes, they begin at the same moment - the invention of motion pictures - but take off running in parallel universes. One is the story of a very public debate over how much of the reality of human sexuality can be shown, discussed or even implied in movies meant for general audiences; the second is the story of an entire industry thriving along underground yet rarely even mentioned in polite company until the 1970s.

That said, many may wonder if we aren't beginning to see these two storylines merge. It's hardly any wonder when you've got - just as one of many examples - Hollywood cutie-pie Meg Ryan strutting around naked and settling down for a two-minute bout of onscreen cunnilingus, courtesy of Mark Ruffalo in In the Cut (2003). While boundaries are blurring, though, there remains a thin line of difference: In the Cut director Jane Campion hasn't ever told an audience, "Come see my film - it's got lots of hot sex!" At least not overtly; covertly, of course, that's very much what's going on. But Campion, like countless directors before her, will put the proper face on it: This is an erotic thriller about a woman's control over her own life and the explicitness of the sex is absolutely necessary for the sake of the story. Director Paul Thomas, on the other hand, will be more than happy to tell you that narrative and just about anything else takes a back seat to the sex in "Dangerous Games".

In that first parallel universe, sex is icing on the cake. In the second, it is the cake.

Porn before its "Golden Age"

At a time when porn comes tumbling in front of your face via email, when it's displayed in independent video rental outlets and newsstands, when it's immediately viewable at the push of a button in most hotel rooms or in private homes via cable, it can be hard to remember or even imagine a time when the stuff was not only not available but downright illegal - a time when glimpses of a naked body, never mind one engaged in any sort of sexual activity, were extraordinarily rare.

Except maybe in art. But even in that hallowed realm, the body has always been a battlefield for all sorts of religious and political wrangling. The most famous of these battles was probably fought in the 16th century when, ten years after Michelangelo had completed his epic portrayal of the Divine Creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, an artist known now to history only as "the breeches maker" was hired to paint flowing robes over the naughty bits. And so it went, on into the 20th century when, for example, in 1933, a British philosopher by the name of Samuel Alexander could still write, "If the nude is so treated that it raises in the spectator ideas or desires appropriate to the material subject, it is false art, and bad morals." In other words, if the artist turns you on, bully on him.

Nonsense, countered art historian Kenneth Clark in "The Nude" twenty years later: "No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even although it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so, it is bad art and false morals." Because erotic desire is an inextricable part of human nature, or, as David Byrne sings in the opening line of his Rei Momo album, "Now and then, I get horny." And by the 1950s, it was socially acceptable for even an Oxford professor like Clark to admit it.

Many things, though, like the explicit depiction of sex, weren't as socially acceptable. In any medium. Which is a funny thing, considering that just about the first thing we humans do with any new medium we come up with is test its ability to arouse. The cave painters had their depictions of fertility rites, the Bible had its Song of Solomon, and what many consider the world's first novel, Lady Murasaki's 11th century "Tale of Genji", is, among other things, an erotic journey. It wasn't long after the first photo was snapped, in the 1820s, that people were getting undressed in front of these newfangled cameras.

Historians quibble over who actually invented the motion picture and when, but let's just go with the most popular version for the moment: Auguste and Louis LumiпїЅre staged the first public screening of a film in December 1895. Less than a year later, so the legend goes, actress Louise Willy stripped for the French film "Le Bain" ("The Bath"). While similar films were being shot all over Europe, the term "French films" in the early 20th century denoted the same thing "Swedish films" did in and around the 1960s: skin and lots of it.

In those early days, film stock and equipment was rare and expensive, so access to a screening of a rare and forbidden clip of film was like entering, as Walter Kendrick calls it in the title of his history of porn, "The Secret Museum". "Pornography names an argument, not a thing," writes Kendrick, contending that the fluid and ever-evolving definition of porn is a tool used by those in power to forbid access to something for those who aren't. Could be. What we do know is that these early, sexually explicit films were most often projected in private clubs or homes for a men-only audience. Imagine such a screening, and you can well understand why the films were called "smokers" in the beginning: a bunch of men sitting around in the dark puffing away their nervous energy on smoldering cigars. French director Jean Renoir is rumored to have considered making one of these "smokers" himself in the 20s, but backed down due to "moral considerations."

By the 1950s, these films were being referred to more often as "stags" since they were shown at men-only "stag parties." Luke Ford, in his book "A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film" - an extraordinarily frustrating piece of work; poorly written, misogynist through and through, and yet weirdly useful - quotes William Rostler's outline from his 1973 book, "Contemporary Erotic Cinema", tracing the common plotlines in these early flicks that would be played out again and again for decades:

1. A woman alone becomes aroused after handling a phallic-shaped object. Masturbation follows. A man arrives, is invited inside, sexual play begins.
   
   
2. A farm girl gets excited watching animals copulate. She runs into a farmhand, or a traveling salesman, and sexual play begins.
   
   
3. A doctor begins examining a woman and sexual play begins.
   
   
4. A burglar finds a girl in bed or rapes her or vice versa.
   
   
5. A sunbather or skinny dipper gets caught and seduced.
   
   

Recently, there's been an interest in rediscovering these vintage films and collections have appeared with names such as "Olde Time Erotica", "Antique Erotica", "Authentic Antique Erotica", "Vintage Erotica - Anno 1930" and "Vintage Erotica - Anno 1940". What surprises many expecting to see something rather tame and sepia-toned is the revelation that our grandparents and great-grandparents did just about everything we thought we come up with on our own. But after all, sex is sex.

Sexploitation and the Grindhouse

In the early and mid-20th century, there existed a fascinating limbo between mainstream movies, most of them coming out of Hollywood, of course, and no-holds-barred porn. The "sexploitation" phenomenon in the US has its roots in the 1910s, with the big stand-out year being 1913. That was the year of "Traffic in Souls and The Inside of the White Slave Traffic", both promising to reveal the lurid underbelly of the world of prostitution (and here, it's interesting to note that the original, literal definition of "pornography" is "writing about prostitutes"). The second is notable for having been made by a former Director of the Secret Service, Samuel H. London, who appears on the screen in the first moments of the film to warn viewers that they may well be alarmed by what they are about to see, but rest assured, it's all "For Educational Use."

"White slave pictures are hardly shocking by today's standards," writes Greg Merritt in Celluloid Mavericks: "The exploitation racket was always about the promise of the forbidden... Once projected, many 'SHOCKING TRUTH!' movies such as the innocuous "Damaged Goods" (1914) or "The Sex Lure" (1917) proved to be nothing more than tepid melodrama." Nevertheless, if the "SHOCKING TRUTH!" is defined merely as nudity, there was surprisingly quite a bit of it in the cinema of the 'Teens. DW Griffith himself didn't think twice about including a bathing scene in "Intolerance" (1916), for example, and Merritt describes "a lost classic," "Purity" (1916), in which a nude Audrey Munson is depicted in the context of various works of art: "Because the production recreated classic paintings, censors were not eager to ban the Italian Renaissance, and "Purity" slipped into theaters. Box offices were crowded with men who'd never heard of Botticelli but knew a naked dame when they saw one."

Over the following decades, as cinema rapidly evolved to become America's real favorite pastime, newer, bigger, better and more technologically advanced theaters were required to accommodate demand, leaving some of the old nickelodeons and theaters behind as a sort of second or third-tier circuit for films made on the cheap that would promise unprecedented sex or violence or both. This usually amounted to depictions of life in nudist colonies, such as "Garden of Eden" (1957), or on tropical islands where semi-nude natives (usually homegrown out-of-work actors in threadbare costumes) cavort and get chased by carnivorous monsters, "educational" films addressing such natural phenomena as birth or venereal disease and so on. Often, the films would deliver little that the posters promised, but before word got around, they'd be off to the next town. The theaters they played in became known as grindhouses and a solid account of their heyday is Eddie Muller's "Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of Adults Only Cinema".

A documentary inspired by the book, "Mau Mau Sex Sex" (2001), focuses on two icons of the grindhouse, David Friedman and Dan Sonney, following their long careers from the relatively harmless days of "nudie cuties" through their more daring and darker "roughies," in which women would not only get naked but abused as well. "Mau Mau" director Ted Bonnitt tells us in our interview, "As far as the misogynistic aspect of their work goes, I can count maybe on one hand a few women I know who were offended and didn't like it as a result. I said, 'That's what it's about. I'm not selling these guys. I'm portraying them. Definitely, this went on, and it's weird.'"

According to Luke Ford, Friedman made one of three breakthrough sexploitation flicks to appear in 1959: his "Adventures of Lucky Pierre", Ted Paramore's "Not Tonight, Henry" and Russ Meyer's "The Immoral Mr. Teas". All three broke new ground in terms of what could be shown "above ground," but as Paramore tells Ford, "You were only allowed to shoot girls in bikinis, and then in pasties, then nudes. But you couldn't show pubic hair." Paramore, the son of Hollywood screenwriter Edward Paramore, began his career making erotic film loops as mild as he describes; "Not Tonight", his first feature, tells the story of Hank Henry, who fantasizes about having sex with the likes of Cleopatra, Pocahontas and Lucrezia Borgia.

For decades, Russ Meyer has practically been an industry unto himself. Returning home after World War II unsure of what to do with his life, a friend asked him, "'Why don't you start shooting girls?'," he tells Kenneth Turan and Stephen Zito in their 1974 book, "Sinema: American Pornographic Films and the People Who Make Them". "And so I did, and I dug it, I really dug it. I had a kind of bombastic style, very mild by what's considered strong today, but I got into it hammer and sickle." "Mr. Teas" is a bachelor who can inexplicably see through women's clothing. Shot for $24,000, the film pulled in over a million during its initial run. Through the 60s and 70s, Meyer would share his taste for big-breasted, take-charge women, probably most famously in "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" (1966).

Honorable mention must be made of two more unique and remarkable careers. Ed Wood is known the world over for his no-budget, so-bad-they're-good sci-fi flicks, such as "Plan 9 From Outer Space" (1956), but one aspect of his life played down in Tim Burton's biopic was his dabbling in porn, specifically in the form of novels he hammered out with gusto and his hardcore film loops and features, such as "Necromania" (1971), a film he claimed in his book, "Censorship, Sex and the Movies", "exemplifies the trend toward better entertainment in X-rated films." Meaning, of course, sex in coffins.

Radley Metzger, who claimed Max Ophuls and Orson Welles as influences on the films he made from the 60s through the mid-80s, attempted to raise the bar a bit and is known primarily for his softcore "Euro-erotica." As Gary Morris writes in "Bright Lights Film Journal", he is also the best of a "meager lot" of "porn's pioneers who took the sexual revolution seriously and did bring more authentic gay and bi imagery into their 'straight' films." If it took a "Golden Age" to get mainstream society to formally recognize the existence of porn, it would take just as long for most of the porn world to face up to its own underground, gay porn. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hollywood and the Code

You grow up watching Hollywood movies on television, it's easy to get the impression that sex and color must have been invented at around the same time - a notion the film "Pleasantville" (1998) takes off and runs with. It's now easy to snicker at married couples forced to pretend they're happy sleeping in separate single beds, but there was a reason, of course, and the reason was the Hays Code. Its roots go back to 1922 when the Hollywood studios tried to make a show of policing themselves by creating the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and appointed a former Republican Party Chairman and Postmaster General to head it up: William Hays. Soon enough, the MPPDA was known simply as the Hays Office.

It didn't have much effect for a while. In 1930, it drew up a list of "good taste" rules and standards that went pretty much ignored until one Joseph Breen, a ferocious Catholic missionary, threatened to throw the weight of 11 million Catholics who'd signed a pledge behind an all-out boycott of "all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality." The studios snapped to attention and began relentlessly enforcing the Code in July 1934. And it defined "decency and Christian morality" in strictest detail. Just as one absurd example, not only would married couples sleep separately, if they happened to even sit down on the same bed in any film scene, both would have to keep at least one foot firmly planted on the floor.

That's why many films made before 1934 can come as such a surprise. "In language and image, implicit meanings and explicit depictions, elliptical allusions and unmistakable references, pre-Code Hollywood cinema points to a road not taken," writes Thomas Doherty in "Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934". "For four years, the Code commandments were violated with impunity and inventiveness in a series of wildly eccentric films. More unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, they look like Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from a parallel universe."

Still, many have argued that the restrictions made for some of the hottest scenes ever put on film. Filmmakers could obey the letter of the law but still show the smoke, leaving the fire to the imagination. And seriously, has a more erotically charged, more rawly sexual creature ever threatened silver screen with spontaneous combustion than Rita Hayworth's "Gilda"? Everyone remembers Lauren Bacall reminding Humphrey Bogart how to whistle in "To Have and Have Not" (1944), but they forget the near-baritone build-up to the tease: "You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle." And you know the rest.

Gradually, a sort of alternative code was taking shape, a systematic language of signs standing in for what couldn't be shown. A kiss, and then a pan to the waves crashing up on the beach. Fireworks overhead? Orgasm. And an alternative alternative code evolved in the gay and lesbian subcultures of Hollywood, marvelously documented in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's "The Celluloid Closet". Lines like John Ireland's to Montgomery Clift in "Red River" flew right past the censors: "There are only two things more beautiful than a good gun - a Swiss watch, or a woman from anywhere. You ever had a Swiss watch?"

But of course, it's in our nature to want more than just a tease. Anyone who didn't want to creep over to the seedy side of town and slip into a porn theater before the advent of home video, held out hope that they might catch a flash of flesh from Europe at an art house cinema or a film festival. Few admitted it (though famed auteur theorist Andrew Sarris would years later in the New York Times), but many were looking for more than art in the European films that crossed the Atlantic between the end of WWII and the late 60s. Of course, Europe's reputation as a more sexually liberated continent had long been established, and on the screen, works like "Ecstasy" (1932) featuring Hedy Lamarr as a young woman exploring her sexuality, often without the benefit of clothes, only served to firm up that rep.

While cinephiles haunted screenings of early Ingmar Bergman or Michelangelo Antonioni (his Blow Up [1966] in particular promised to show what made London swing), European filmmakers kept pressing into new, previously forbidden territory, only occasionally setting off alarms at the US Customs Office, as "I Am Curious - Yellow" did in 1967. From Japan, there was "Woman in the Dunes" (1964), and "foreign films" in general could rouse a good controversy in many a community with a university film society in its midst, right on through the 70s. Among the notorious would be "Night Porter" (1973), "Salo" (1975), I"n the Realm of the Senses" (1976), "Caligula" (1980), and list goes on...

The "Golden Age"

Why "Golden Age"? Consider that between 1972 and 1983, porn - not sexy Hollywood fare, not racy sexploitation, not European art films, but pure, unabashed porn - chalked up 16 percent of total box office returns in the US. And yet, 16 percent of all American moviegoers in the 70s were most definitely not dirty old men in raincoats. What was going on? The answer could be as brief as two words: Sexual. Revolution.

You already know all the clichпїЅs about what all the 60s brought and wrought. Just a few buzzwords to set the scene: The pill. Satisfaction. Woodstock. Make love not war. The miniskirt, and later, hip-huggers, then hot pants. And so on. In the movies, a few tell-tale signs of the times: In 1970, "Midnight Cowboy" became the first - and last - X-rated movie to win an Oscar for Best Picture (not to mention Best Director for John Schlesinger). Two years later, Marlon Brando would follow his comeback performance in "The Godfather" with what some argue to be the last performance he took seriously: Paul, the grieving expatriate in "Last Tango in Paris" (1972) who plunges into an affair with a younger woman with ravenous abandon. Butter jokes were everywhere, and if you wanted to be in on them, you had to go see this movie.

It was in this atmosphere that many Americans decided that maybe it was okay after all to check out something even racier. Perhaps the first above-ground box office success, a film people weren't ashamed to line up for, was "Pornography in Denmark" (1970), for which San Francisco-based hardcore pioneer Alex de Renzy conducted interviews with Danes immediately after their country had done away with censorship altogether and - this was the draw - spliced in a few choice examples of what was going on over there. "Denmark" was distributed by Sherpix, credited with the first hardcore fictional feature, "Mona: The Virgin Nymph" (1970) and the first hardcore 3D feature, "The Stewardesses" (1970).

By 1971, the "New York Times" had dubbed San Francisco "The Porn Capital of America." On July 4, 1969, Jim and Artie Mitchell had opened the O'Farrell Theater, where they would show groundbreaking films such as "Autobiography of a Flea" (1976). Why groundbreaking? Because not only was it a period piece, it was directed by a woman, Sharon McKnight, and featured the debut of Paul Thomas. The Mitchell Brothers would also make a star out of one of the original "Ivory Soap girls," Marilyn Chambers (real name: Marilyn Briggs). "Behind the Green Door" (1972) is a psychedelic, arty, very San Francisco sort of porn film which nevertheless "became a lightning rod in the debate over pornography," writes Ford. "Defenders saw Chambers as a nice girl who discovers herself through sex. Opponents saw her character as enslaved and humiliated... Jim and Artie Mitchell loved the fight because it sold tickets to their film."

San Francisco of the 70s was also, of course, the Mecca to which gays and lesbians, bi- and transsexuals, just about anyone whose sexuality was not welcome in flyover country, flocked. Wakefield Poole is credited with making the first modern gay hardcore adult film, "Boys in the Sand", filmed on Fire Island and released in New York in December 1971. But for Poole, San Francisco was home and, besides other features, he shot a documentary on the Gay Pride Parade in 1974 before abandoning film in the late 80s. It's not an unhappy ending, though. He's an admired chef and wrote his autobiography in 2000, "Dirty Poole: The Autobiography of a Gay Porn Pioneer". In 2002, New York's Anthology Film Archives presented a retrospective of his early films.

But back to the 70s, specifically, to 1972, the year the dam broke. Director Gerard Damiano unleashed the "Deep Throat" juggernaut in June of that year at the New World Theater on 49th Street in New York City. Turan and Zito report that among those who took in its first run were Frank Sinatra, Spiro Agnew, Warren Beatty, Truman Capote, and of course, Bob Woodward. For the New York Times film critic at the time, Vincent Canby, it was simply a matter of sheer luck, a confluence of social forces: "I'm sure if "Deep Throat" hadn't caught the public's fancy at this point in history, some other porno film, no better and maybe no worse, would have."

But Damiano was the lucky one, ushering in an age of what that same paper called "porno chic." "Deep Throat" was the talk of late night TV, "the one XXX film to attend to see what all the fuss was about," writes Merritt, "grossing tens of millions of dollars (totals vary greatly)." It also made a celebrity out of Linda Lovelace, a controversial figure who later claimed that she performed in all her porn films - and there were many, shorts and features alike - at gunpoint. In the 80s and early 90s, Lovelace became a mascot for feminist critics of the porn industry such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon who claimed that porn incites men to act violently towards women. Dworkin and MacKinnon sparked a debate that split feminism down the middle. Katie Roiphe, for example, countered, "Precisely the danger in this kind of feminism is that it creates a dwindling space for men. It makes men into objectifiers - sleazy, brutish creatures only interested in sex."

And "Deep Throat" itself, as a film? Well, the story is based on a rather unusual premise. A woman, Lovelace, pays her doctor a visit, complaining that she's never experienced an orgasm. Dr. Young (Harry Reems) discovers the cause: Her clitoris is in her throat. Despite the humor, a welcome innovation in the genre, most argue that Damiano's other porn blockbuster of the same year, "The Devil in Miss Jones", is the better film.

One other landmark of the "Golden Age" should be mentioned, Radley Metzger's "The Opening of Misty Beethoven"(1975), widely regarded as one of the best of the era and winner of the first annual Erotic Film Festival Award. Of course, it also marked a move for Metzger out of the realm of softcore; he filmed it under the name Henry Paris.

That was then, this is now

Anyone who's seen Paul Thomas Anderson's "Boogie Nights" can tell you what put an end to the "Golden Age": Video. The advent of home video, on the one hand, which had a radical effect on the entire industry, not just porn, and on the other, the use of video in production. Suddenly, porn could be made quite cheaply, which was bad news for directors used to generous budgets and a non-assembly line approach, and it could be viewed in the privacy of one's own home, which was certainly bad news for theaters like the O'Farrell and countless others coast to coast.

But in many ways, the video revolution of the 1980s was a positive development. "The Porn Capital of America" has long since shifted south to Los Angeles, but video did open doors to anyone just about anywhere who wanted to make their own sort of erotica that would be an alternative to the male-gaze-centric hetero fare that had dominated porn for far too long. Gay porn boomed and sex-positive female stars such as Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley and Candida Royale launched careers not only in front of the camera but behind it as well.

Video was just the first step in the widening proliferation of porn outside the movie theater; with the Internet, that proliferation exploded. It's become such an obvious and, in the case of spam, all but unavoidable fact of life that not only has it been generally accepted as such but there's also been something of a revival of "porn chic," 21st century-style. Doonesbury characters are surfing porn, porn stars are endorsing products and production companies like Vivid are written up in high profile national papers and magazines. The ultimate measure, though, is probably economic. "Estimates of annual revenue for adult entertainment - porn film sales and rentals, Web site subscriptions and fees, and so on - range from $8 billion to $10 billion," USA Today recently reported. Just over $4 billion of that loot comes from film sales and rentals, according to the trade industry bible, "Adult Video News".

Those aren't the sorts of figures Hollywood cares to ignore. Boogie Nights itself represents a shift in attitudes as to what's appropriate for mainstream audiences to see; it's not all that less explicit than the films its characters are shooting. But it's the French once again who seem hell-bent on pushing those boundaries even further. The wave of non-porn yet vividly explicit films coming out of France in the last several years - Catherine Breillat's Romance, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's "Baise-Moi", and Patrice Chereau's "Intimacy" - has hardly gone without comment in film journals. In the French journal Trafic, critic Jean-Marie Samocki argues that explicitness has become a matter of national identity: "France," as Philippa Hawker sums up the argument in an Australian paper, "faced by what it perceives as the globalising and homogenising power of American culture, sees a way to define itself otherwise. There are some places it can go, cinematically, that Hollywood cannot."

Perhaps not the studios, and perhaps not directly. But if Hollywood icons like Meg Ryan, and for that matter, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" are stripping down on screen to get it on, it may be only a matter of time. How did Kidman's character end that film? "I do love you, and you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible."

"What's that?" asks Tom.

"F**k."

The days of whistling lessons are long over.

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