Tham Revolutionary Desires

The Political Power of the Sex Scene
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-916637-09-2
Verlag: 404 Ink
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 27, 112 Seiten

Reihe: Inklings

Sex on screen is unnecessary, gratuitous, and serves no purpose. This is the sentiment on the rise as cinema becomes less and less sexy. Xuanlin Tham counters that sex scenes can open our minds and bodies to the possibility of new futures, and seduce us towards an expanded political imagination. Through The Matrix Reloaded, Lingua Franca and beyond, Revolutionary Desires explores how the form's intimacies, transgressions, and dedication to pleasure can be uniquely poised to rupture dominant narratives of capitalism and the violences that flow from it. Why is the sex scene, demonised as it is, therefore more politically important and subversive than ever? And how can it power a desire for something more?

Xuanlin Tham is a writer, critic, and curator based in Edinburgh. They write for British GQ, i-D, Little White Lies, AnOther Magazine, and The Skinny, among others, covering culture (and sometimes sports). They curate for Take One Action, an arts organisation harnessing the transformative power of film and storytelling for collective change.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tham, Xuanlin

Leseproben

Chapter 1: The disappearance of the sex scene

On my walk home from work, I routinely make my way past a large LED billboard that feeds pedestrians and commuters a stream of advertisements: for eye serums, mobile phone plans, streaming services. Last year, I remember seeing one that read: ‘Say hello to The Recliner. Buy online for £7.99.’ From far away, it could have registered as an ad for an outrageously inexpensive armchair. Drawing slightly closer – or indeed, because of the familiar stylings of its black, white, and orange branding – you’d quickly realise it was an ad for the multiplex cinema chain, Vue.

I was struck by this ad: this idea that we could be enticed to the movie theatre not by what’s on screen, but by the chairs we’d get to sit in. We are all very tired: by work, care responsibilities, how the bare necessities of living, let alone leisure, are becoming unaffordable, perhaps tired of the uncomfortable sofa in a living room we will rent but never own. Maybe it’s fine to show up for The Recliner’s promise of structured comfort and distraction, and not really mind what we are being distracted by.

It is strange, though, that our bodies – beckoned towards The Recliner’s business class plane seat mobility, the same bodies that keep this whole movie business afloat by buying tickets to watch something at the cinema – can be positioned at the forefront of the movie theatre experience, but are overwhelmingly becoming less of a concern for movies themselves. Cast an eye over the ads that plaster the sides of buses, what’s steadily raked in billions at the box office over the past decade or so, and the way our theatres are becoming increasingly dominated by franchises, reboots, sequels and Cinematic Universes: do any of these films attempt to engage us meaningfully as bodies that touch, feel, desire?

Talking through his selections in the Criterion Collection’s DVD closet, actor Gael García Bernal picks up a copy of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 film Y tu mamá también. In this film, two teenage boys – one played by a then 21-year-old García Bernal – embark on a road trip across Mexico with a beautiful older woman. Together, with her guidance, they encounter lessons in love, friendship, grief, and life. Initially more of a horny, irreverent playground for the boys – the film’s comedic opening scene sees them squeezing in one last quickie with their respective girlfriends before the girls catch a flight to Italy – sex is eventually where they shed their immature machismo in favour of discovering more profound intimacies, culminating with a devastatingly moving three-way that marks the film’s bittersweet, vulnerable swan song. Sex is an essential part of the film’s coming-of-age story, of the emotional textures of its characters’ lives. Made over twenty years ago, the film feels like it belongs to a bygone era. “I want you to tell me which film has made you horny in the last years,” García Bernal says, holding the DVD in his hands. “There’s not many. I miss that from cinema.”8

There is a particular travesty he identifies here. It’s not just that the sex scene is becoming a rarity, but that the kind of film that’s even interested in drawing us closer with touch, feeling, and visceral response – that eroticism itself, explicit or implied – is disappearing. Even beyond the remit of the erotic thriller and its heyday in the 1980s-90s, desire and sexuality was once regarded a normal topic of exploration across genres: as quotidian and worthy of attention as anything else in our lives. Mike Nichols’ 1967 coming-of-age classic The Graduate had sex in it; Spike Lee’s 1989 comedy drama Do The Right Thing had sex in it; even blockbusters and superhero movies contained some pretty unhinged sexual energy. Remember the ghost blowjob in Ghostbusters? Or Michelle Pfeiffer’s iconic BDSM-inspired latex Catwoman costume in Batman Returns, and her lasciviously licking Michael Keaton’s face?

Today, as culture congeals into an increasingly monolithic and corporatised shape, it’s become harder to imagine that such broad and unremarkable space for sexuality once existed in our cinemas. In its place, a numbing distance has steadily grown between our bodies and those we see on screen. This is not because we’ve somehow ascended to some post-corporeal realm where the body is left behind: in her brilliant essay for Blood Knife Magazine ‘Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny’, writer Raquel S. Benedict traces how the physically “perfect” body – muscular, sculpted, flawless – has become the fetishised obsession of the movies, even as these same bodies are utterly drained of desire.9 In the era of the superhero movie’s unchallenged dominance over cinema, she astutely calls today’s stars action figures, not action heroes. From Chris Evans’ Captain America to Henry Cavill’s Superman, they are homogenous, replicable, pristine, and ready to help us live out our fantasies of beating the shit out of the bad guys. They exist to be seen not so much as real human bodies, but as commodities: to sell you more of these movies. While those skin-tight costumes cling to every swell and crevice of muscle definition, there must remain an anxiously smooth lump where arousal and desire will never enter the frame. These bodies on screen are primed for violence, not sex. In Benedict’s words, they are only horny for annihilation.

In 2021, the release of the superhero film Eternals – following the eponymous aliens secretly living on Earth who are forced to come out of hiding to protect it – sparked quite the commotion over the fact that it would contain the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first ever sex scene. Directed by Chloé Zhao, fresh from garnering the Academy Award for Best Director for her independent film Nomadland, Eternals saw Marvel attempt to position itself as capable of pivoting towards more arthouse sensibilities. Yet the much-talked-about sex scene (and the film itself) was comically slight and awkward. Following some incredibly chemistry-less kissing between Gemma Chan’s Sersi and Richard Madden’s Ikaris, two Eternals we are supposed to believe share a millennia-spanning romance, we cut to their disrobed bodies chastely rocking in missionary for about three seconds. It is a begrudging display of what Charles Pulliam-Moore, writing for The Verge, described as “perfunctory sexual congress”.10 The MCU had finally decided to confront the self-inscribed limits of its own sexlessness, yet found itself incapable of summoning even the slightest embodied desire needed to sell a sex scene between two beautiful people.

To play another Eternal named Kingo, actor Kumail Nanjiani underwent intense training to attain the unnaturally built physique now typical of the superhero film. According to Nanjiani’s personal trainer Grant Roberts, although Zhao and Marvel were perfectly happy for Kingo to be “normal looking”, the actor felt a certain responsibility to ensure that as a South Asian superhero, his character would be mega-ripped, too.11 In an interview for Men’s Journal, Roberts jokes about Nanjiani having the “softest core” he’d ever seen, saying he had no idea how the actor “was even able to stand up straight”.12 The training regimen consisted of “punishing” workout sessions five days a week for the year leading up to the shoot; intensive calorie restriction and meal planning; and the use of electric muscle stimulation, where you put on a suit of pads hooked up to wires that electrocute you every two to three seconds.13 If this is what he’d put his body through, is it any wonder that the film’s poor reception – described by critics as “puzzlingly bad”, “numbing” 14, and “forgettable”15 – left Nanjiani so shaken that he had to start going to therapy? “[My wife] Emily says I do have trauma from it,” the actor shared on a podcast.16

“A body is no longer a holistic system,” writes Benedict, exemplified by Eternals’ curiously sexless sex scene and Nanjiani’s gruelling pursuit of an inhuman, physical ideal (even more troubling for how explicitly its parameters are inscribed by whiteness). “It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy. It is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets.”17

Reading Nanjiani’s personal trainer joke about his “soft core” saddened me. Under late-stage capitalism, our bodies’ disaggregation into its composite parts helps sell us the fantasy that our unhappiness might be remedied by consumerism, one generated insecurity at a time. Personal trainers and high-tech gym equipment, tummy slimming teas, push-up bras, jaw training gum, cellulite-melting creams. In a satirical video by animator Bryce Cohen posted to Instagram, a woman asks her date whether he thinks she’s pretty: “What kind of pretty? Bunny pretty, deer pretty, rat pretty, frog pretty, girl pretty, boy pretty? I know I’m not quite 30...