Make Hollywood Horny Again, Warner Bros. Discovery is Born, Bruce Willis retires, and Amazon buys MGM
Weekly Reel, April 13
The mainstream has been picking up on the fact that Marvel’s superheroes and other testosterone-fueled franchise characters are unrealistically asexual. One would expect these characters to have Olympic Village (100,000 condoms are ordered for the Summer Games’ athletes) levels of sexual tension with all the other peak-performance, mega-cgi A-listers. This leaves an opening for mainstreaming films with eroticism, preferably starring hot celebrities, or have we been living in the infantilized Disneyverse for too long?
Adrian Lyne made his first film in 20 years, Deep Water, starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, which was quietly dumped on Hulu because Disney had no idea what to do with an erotic thriller. Lyne became an household name in 1987 with Fatal Attraction, which bumped the erotic thriller into a Hollywood blockbuster genre. The genre enjoyed considerable success in the home video era, where the viewer could close the blinds before pressing play. Since the genre’s flaccid demise (I didn’t come up with this expression), Deep Water is one the first to get people excited about its return, which initiated the Make Hollywood Horny Again week at Vulture.
Alison Willmore claims the erotic thriller fizzled out due to the internet and decline in rental home viewing while Chris Lee makes the case for an inverse relationship between erotic thrillers and superhero fare/internet porn. But as Lee further indicates, producers are currently testing the waters, this time with female executives developing much of the content. Allison P. Davis has nostalgia for the time when erotic thrillers sparked public discussions about sex and violence, “but the conversations they started aren’t even close to climax.”
Continuing the discussion with Deep Water in mind, Davis thinks it “doesn’t deliver the two elements that make the genre amazing: hot sex and high-stakes thrills that complicate how we feel about the hot sex.”
It was that special blend that made an erotic thriller an erotic thriller. Even when they were regressive, even when they compelled assholes to scream sexist tirades at the screen, the genre offered a window into society’s sexual anxieties. Fatal Attraction ends when Dan’s wife, Beth (Anne Archer), kills Alex in self-defense. As the credits roll, the camera lingers on a family photo on their mantle indicating that all is right. The single woman is dead, and the family unit will survive despite her. Yet the film’s eroticism also came from the idea that the accepted power balance, and everything associated with it — marriages, livelihoods, social order, male dominance — was sitting on a precipice. Everything could go off a cliff at any moment with a flick of a red-nailed finger. So the sex had to be good — really fucking good — to justify risking all of that in the first place.
Why isn’t the Fast and Furious franchise going for this high-adrenaline (also an expression I'm stealing) fun?
On the genre being socio-culturally dependent:
What I’m missing is the feeling that the sex is not just an act but a manifestation of something we aren’t supposed to acknowledge about the ways pleasure intersects with pain and power. These films dislodged something in the cultural psyche of the ’90s, reflecting the concerns, tastes, anxieties, fears, and politics (good and bad) of the yuppies in the audience. They genuinely turned viewers on and genuinely terrified them.
You can’t just slap the ’90s on a 2020s erotic thriller and expect it to work — they have to be re-created to speak to our specific anxieties. The good thing, for erotic-thriller fans, is that many of the conversations these movies provoked are more unfinished than we like to think.
I think this can be chalked down to generational cycles of public interest boom and bust (this expressions is my own). Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct are to us what Vertigo and Pyscho were to their generation. Also, I’m not sure where this fits in but the main propagators of the eighties and nineties erotic thrillers (Paul Verhoeven, Adrian Lyne, and Joe Eszterhas) are European (and Hitchcock was British), which accounts for the nudity at the very least.
More about the films’ connection to the era:
It’s easy to smugly acknowledge how out-of-date these movies are. What was considered shocking was born from the kinds of topics that dominated dinner parties in 1991. They didn’t have the same language to discuss slut shaming or the male anxiety over women’s sexual power the way we do now. What was considered taboo onscreen was way more scandalizing in a more sexually conservative climate, one where the AIDS epidemic had led to increased moralizing around sex. Because everything feels so dated, and “of another time,” it’s hard to see the organic sexiness that existed at the time. We can only analyze the power and the politics and the gender dynamics, not the primal reaction.
It also just feels easier to look backward. Because we’ve stopped being able to talk about sex — actual fleshy, part-to-part, carnal enjoyment of sex — seriously. (You could probably trace this back, in part, to the Clinton scandal, a controversy that unintentionally turned the country into prudes.) We can talk about gender politics and sexual politics, cultural criticism of sex, or the danger of sex, or why we should talk more openly about women’s desire, all with deathly seriousness. But it’s hard to have those conversations while being turned on by the act itself, which is what erotic thrillers ask us to do: to watch hot sex and have big feelings about how complicated and messy and fun it can be all at once.
To me, it’s clear we still have a use for erotic thrillers. It’s why we keep reconsidering the old ones. Nina K. Martin, erotic-thriller scholar and author of Sexy Thrills, has argued that people are nostalgic for the way sex used to be portrayed, and I agree. It’s not that we have an entirely new set of anxieties or taboos to explore (though there are certainly some new ones to add to the list). It’s that we haven’t finished the conversations we were having in 1987 and now seem harder to have in the same thorny way. There’s a reluctance in mainstream cinema to discuss the way that sex, power, danger, and pleasure are all twisted up in each other like bodies at an orgy; we’re not supposed to acknowledge the ways in which dominance, or being pursued (stalked), can be thrilling to watch and not just scary. Right now, it’s too hard to examine a feeling of “This is insane and terrifying and probably not okay, but it’s also hot!” even through the distant gaze of fictional characters. It’s hard to look at the darker parts.
Although I don’t totally agree (the relationship between the sexes is more deep-rooted than what’s happening with the cultural wars etc. etc.), it’s still something to nibble on.
If one wants to do their research, one can find these films on Hulu (Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, Unfaithful, and Deep Water), Prime Video (The Handmaiden, Cruel Intentions 2, and The Voyeurs), Netflix (Chloe and Wild Things), HBO Max (American Gigolo), and Tubi (Swimfan, Dream Lover, Double Lover, The Crush, and The Last Seduction).
Letterboxd Reviews
[I’ve been posting more reviews on my Letterboxd and would like to include them in the Weekly Reel to be able to expand the number of films being discussed beyond the ones reviewed in length.]
Morbius (2022): Marvel Meets Murnau (★★)
One can read "Morbius," to steal Tarantino’s Top Gun theory, as a story about a man learning to cope with his homosexuality. From the implied closer-than-friendship upbringing of Morbius (Jared Leto) and Milo (Matt Smith) to the dominant theme of bloody vampirism, which paired with Leto’s Dallas Buyers Club pale and handicap aesthetic brings the ghost of AIDS to the fore, one need not look further.
Morbius and Milo suffer from a rare blood disorder that requires transfusions to ward off death but leaves them in a caned state. In becoming the world expert on blood science, Morbius finds a cure that turns him into a killer vampire. Lucien later takes it unsupervised and advocates for their Spartan “few against the many” lifestyle, again bringing homosexuality into implied discussion. Morbius spends the thankfully short film battling his urges between Lucien and his colleague Martine (Adria Arjona).
The problems are many but the biggest are the script and direction. Neither offer Leto the chance to flex his Oscar-winning acting muscles, which is the problem we all found with Suicide Squad. Sony runs its own Spider-Man miniverse adjacent to (“in association with”) the Holy Marvel Empire, which gives the film a strange target audience of fans of superheroes and vampires. (Come to think of it, Pattinson’s The Batman successfully landed that audience). Morbius will compete with Venom for worst Marvel-associated property and confirm Holland’s Spider-Man trilogy the exception to the rule that only Marvel can corner the superhero market.
Put simply, the film offers nothing for anybody. I’m guessing the short runtime was due to post-production edits after poor test screenings. Either way, the ending sets up a sequel that will surely flop harder than Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
The Square (2017): The Quotidian Quad (★★★½)
35 years ago Andres Serrano won a federally-funded award for his Piss Christ photo, which at the time helped inflame the 80s culture wars regarding freedom of expression with respect to the public coffers. In this film, writer/director Ruben Östlund brings this issue up when a public art museum releases an exhibition's promotional video featuring a homeless blonde girl blown-up in a public square. This leads to the sacking of the museum's head curator-protagonist, Christian (Claes Bang), explaining that his personal opinions about freedom of expression aren't the same as that of the publicly-funded museum.
Although released only five years ago, it could have been 35 considering how seemingly ancient the issues were pre-Covid/Russia: non-white immigrants in Europe, freedom of expression, and the reflexive repentance for throw-away sins. Considering the film heavily relies on such issues in a provocative manner, it makes sense that it won the Palme d'Or but then fizzled away from pertinence.
Bang doesn't live up to his name in doing a banger-upper compared with Terry Notary, the medium's greatest stunt/creature actor, who plays an ape better than Anne's (Elisabeth Moss) unexplained Bonobo. Moss, basically just comic relief in a film that needs less, is a curved puzzle piece trying to fit a rectangular grid.
The climax, with the release of the provocative video, packs a smaller punch than expected and leads to the problem that many of the film's scenes are like the video: being laughed at rather than with.
France (2021): ★★★½
France shows the ugly side of celebrity tv journalism, one where staging and multiple takes have precedence over human lives. We watch as France (Léa Seydoux), France's top tv journalist, has her coming-to-the-light moment after a car accident that forces her to confront the real. For it's ambition and acting, the story holds better than it otherwise would have. It seems to fall apart as France falls apart then presses the storytelling nuclear button by killing off the family in a car accident (maybe the worst filmed in history for serious, non B-film or action-based cinema). Although Seydoux gives it her all, it doesn't hit the way it was envisioned. She has her moment, changes her outlook after some time off, then...? is the problem I have with it.
The Importance of Being Earnest (1952): The *vital* importance of being earnest. (★★★½)
Is Michael Denison not the love child of James Stewart and Dick Van Dyke? One of the few texts that can be consumed faster than its film adaptation. Almost every other line can be quoted/memed. The original play is 127 years old and this film is 70; no doubt the story can live on longer through thespian worship.
Steve Jobs (2015): ★★★
I’ve just read up until the events at the beginning of this film in the Isaacson hagiography, so I’ll be updating this with edits when I find glaring differences (I’ve heard there’s plenty). But this doesn’t and shouldn’t be a form of reviewing the integrity of the film as a film.
But as a film, it seemed really bizarre by act three realizing that some of Jobs’s most personal and professional climaxes all colliding thirty minutes before a big product launch. Was Sorkin bored with the multi-geographic cross-cutting of The Social Network and needed a challenging confinement?Edit1: Basically non of the film's pre-1984 launch drama happened in the source material. I find all the events that led up to this (teaming with Woz, being a shaven-headed hippie in India, working alongside his father in the garage, etc.) much more interesting than when Apple was already on the map. Is that the era that the Kutscher movie covered and botched? Reading all the crazy things that happened and the different personalities, as well as the current skew towards miniseries would make Steve Jobs/Apple an amazing season-long HBO show in the right hands.
Edit2: Okay it's easier to describe all (actually just one) of the ways in which this film adheres to it's source material: Steve Jobs abandoned his first-born child at birth and didn't acknowledge her until way too late. The film is therefore a tertiary piece of media; in other words, an interpretation of a work that interprets reality. In this way, Sorkin and Boyle are able to veer much further from reality given the exponential reach given to a tertiary text, which they properly understood.
Ambulance (2022): The Return of Bay Action Porn (★★★)
Michael Bay was a good boy one year and for Christmas his parents decided to get him a nice drone that could support his custom made Red Bayhems. The movie is exactly what one would expect. It's also his attempt at claiming a spot in the bloated LA action thriller genre.
For Angelinos, the movie's stunts in famous city spots (e.g. helicopters flying below the LA river bridges) would be interesting but for others it's just an adaptation of a 2005 Danish film set in HW. I'm glad that Bay didn't make another schlocky franchise film yet I still don't know what to do with this.
News
WarnerMedia is becoming Warner Bros. Discovery after AT&T sold WarnerMedia to Discovery. Although unmentioned, this could impact HBO Max with more than just a possible name change.
Bruce Willis is retiring after being diagnosed with a communicative disorder caused by brain damage. Were all his recent cash-grab performances done with this knowledge? If so, that raises some ethical concerns that I'm sure HW will never address.
Amazon finally buys MGM for $8.5 billion. Prime Video announced that all James Bond films, which were only available piecemeal unless one bought the expensive boxset, will be available in April.
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