Why sexuality and the cinema

The presence and the hold of the mass media, or media of social communication, bear upon people’s behaviour and habits: this is an indisputable fact.

We live in a “global village”. Marshall McLuhan, who coined the term and defined the concept, did not imagine that it would take on such an extension and, at the same time, such simultaneity and such smallness. He explained what looks like a contradiction.

The breadth of the “village” we live in reaches the remotest corner of the planet. Simultaneity, for its part, comes from the progress of radio communications and of electronics, which allow us to see and to hear the same thing at different points of the world at the same moment.

As regards people’s sexual behaviour, the media of social communication have significantly influenced the change in morals. This is due to broader access to information and to the knowledge of conducts different from those that are traditional or accepted in certain societies and cultures. The mass media have helped to bring down myths and beliefs, just as they have also contributed to creating them. I hold that they have been more positive than negative, and that is what I shall try to show.

The most significant and the most important thing is that they have popularised, democratised, that is to say “massified” sexual pleasure, which has historically been the privilege of the elites of money or of intelligence and of the upper social class.

The media of social communication or of mass communication (I shall use both terms interchangeably) have made it possible to share the intimacy of a few people and to copy or reproduce sexual behaviours that were held to be improper and, at times, even non-existent.

The media with the greatest impact

Within the vast range of existing media of social communication, I have chosen the cinema for this talk, even though I have thought it necessary to analyse television as well, however superficially and tangentially; which does not prevent me from acknowledging the importance of other media, in particular of what is called the women’s press. Through the information it circulates, the latter contributes to the change in women’s sexual behaviour. It has presented, analysed and discussed the question of the right to a pleasurable, guilt-free and uninhibited female sexuality; but in the same movement it has created a new stereotype of woman, taking her out of the kitchen and out of domestic tasks in order to show her in perfect physical shape, perfumed, her skin soft, her hair silky and well styled, sensually dressed, always ready to serve a man’s desires.

Here is a subject that will have to be analysed and gone into more deeply another time. For if the image of the woman-mother at home was once presented and “sold” for the use and the usufruct of the man, it is today the image of the sensual woman in bed that is presented and “sold”, as one more product at the service and for the consumption of the man. Which makes me think that these “women’s” magazines are either run by men, or run by women who are not very aware of what they are doing. I nevertheless believe that the contribution of the women’s press has been positive (consciously or not, I do not know). But I do not want to stray from the subject, which is the cinema.

A little history of the cinema

The Lumières’ invention, or entering the bedchamber

The invention of the Lumière brothers allowed the general public, the mass of the population, to enter places until then entirely forbidden to it, such as the intimacy of the bedchamber. It allowed it to “spy on” what was meant to remain the solitude of caresses, to share what, in a kiss, is not shared: to the point of feeling how a foreign tongue explores the other’s mouth and caresses their palate. And today, thanks to pornographic cinema, to the point of accompanying lovers into bed, penetrating into their penetrations.

Before the war, after the war: the first erotic heroes

Pre-war cinema created, timidly, erotic heroes. The passionate and daring kisses — with closed mouths, though, without exchange of saliva or play of tongues — of Rudolph Valentino and Theda Bara made our grandmothers blush and made them close their eyes. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich made people dream; and why not believe that they were the cause of some nocturnal emission or some masturbation in our fathers.

Post-war cinema was far more daring: it created sacred monsters and myths of sensuality and eroticism, such as Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe, the obsession and the dream and fantasy companions of the men of my generation. Brigitte Bardot, whom younger people may know because she now devotes herself to defending seals and whales threatened with extinction, was the first woman, in the middle of the 1950s, to appear entirely naked on a cinema screen. That was in And God Created Woman (Et Dieu… créa la femme), by Roger Vadim, that profane god who was himself a creator of eroticism and beauty, and to whom we owe the discovery, the promotion and the “massification” — allow me the word, which is really clear and telling — of Catherine Deneuve, who was then a beautiful bourgeoise prostituting herself in search of sexual pleasure in Belle de Jour; and of Jane Fonda, who offered us a futuristic sex in Barbarella, creating a new kind of erotic and sexual trigger, and who later, in her full and magnificent maturity, shared with us a beautiful scene, an explicit act of intercourse with a paraplegic (Jon Voight) come back without glory from the Vietnam war in Coming Home. All three were Vadim’s wives: we knew it thanks to the mass media, which made us want to taste a life as prettily eroticised as his.

Fellini: the intimacy of the elites, and Anita Ekberg’s breasts

At the end of the 1950s, Federico Fellini, that magician of human intimacy, of frustration and of desire, made the private sexual life of the Italian aristocracy and money elite known to the general public. We were all able to look at — and to dream that we were caressing — the large white breasts of the Swedish Anita Ekberg, as she bathed, accompanied by Marcello Mastroianni, in the Trevi fountain, in the middle of the Roman night of the dolce vita. It was there that the myth of the “erotic Swedish women”, in search of Latin sex and penises, was born. Fellini recreates it many years later in Amarcord, in the scene of the ball at the hotel where the local seducers conquer Swedish and German women and then tell one another of their successes and their feats: the most considerable being that one of them consented to grant them her “posterior intimacy”, in thanks for their virility and their staying power as lovers.

La Dolce Vita marked, without the slightest doubt, a date in the history of modern sexuality: the title of the film turned into a concept, that of a way of life into which the exchange of partners and group sex — the “orgies”, as we said at the time — were integrated. Shortly afterwards, in another film by Fellini, Peppino De Filippo manages, in an enviable dream, to plunge into and roll about in the large breasts of Anita Ekberg, which filled the screen by reproducing an advertising poster urging people to drink more milk: a way of posing a curious contradiction, and of inviting reflection on the mammary glands as an erotic element, and not only as a biological necessity for feeding one’s offspring.

Those breasts, which lit up the darkness of the auditorium and many a conscience as well, brought out the fact that we human beings, men and women, felt the desire to explore erotically those mammary glands which we had been taught nature had placed on the female for the sole purpose of nursing her children.

Other large cinema breasts followed those of Anita Ekberg: Marilyn Monroe, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, and even the gentle Claudia Cardinale, symbol and synthesis of “erotic and sexual purity” in Fellini’s major film, 8½ (Otto e mezzo).

I leave Fellini here, through whom I could analyse many aspects of sexual behaviour and fantasy. I leave him so that you may recall Marcello Mastroianni’s mistress in 8½, who makes his adolescent sexual fantasies real, and the making explicit of the “harem” fantasy, which Fellini returns to again and again in several of his works. But before leaving him, allow me to recall, for my own part, the monumental breasts of the tobacconist in Amarcord, into which the adolescent plunges with dread and delight.

The 1960s: pleasure, adultery and women’s desire

First transgressions on film

Very shortly after that avant-garde cinema, we witness the first cinematographic cunnilingus. It is Jeanne Moreau who enjoys it, in The Lovers (Les Amants), a film by Louis Malle. I confess it: at the time, many of us did not understand why Jeanne Moreau was showing in close-up her face of enjoyment, an enjoyment she expressed through gasps and cries — which women of that time did not do —, while her lover had disappeared from the screen, downwards, kissing and licking her body.

Many men and women owe Louis Malle and Jeanne Moreau some very pleasant moments of pleasure: they opened up for us the path of a sexual practice that was not very widespread in the 1960s, and that was even spoken of pejoratively. To be a minetero, as cunnilingus was called in my adolescence, did not mean being altogether virile; very often we used that expression as a disqualifying insult. Virility was bound up with penetration. I think it would have cost Torre Nilsson a great deal to imagine his Ecuménico López performing cunnilingus.

Very shortly afterwards, the first anal intercourse in the cinema was shown — or rather suggested. Liv Ullmann taught us that one could have intercourse somewhere other than in the bedchamber with the light out, and through an orifice other than the vagina. That anal intercourse, filmed in Bergman’s The Silence (Tystnaden), took place in the seats of a half-empty cinema.

Adultery, exchange, sharing

At the same period, Michelangelo Antonioni justifies the existence of adultery, from the moment it appears as the effect of a search for pleasure. Monica Vitti, the protagonist of L’Avventura, leaves the security of her comfortable bourgeois home, and her conjugal routine, in search of coital pleasure. Sex for the sake of sexual pleasure.

The question of adultery and of the possibility of sharing one’s partner was long debated and analysed on the basis of an exquisite French film entitled Le Bonheur. This film maintains the thesis that it is possible to “share” one’s conjugal and sexual companion with another woman. A position that is reversed and deepened in another French film of the same period, Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim), where two friends share the same woman.

Female desire and the orgasm on screen

These are the years in which we delighted in taking part in the purely coital and physical pleasure of Dear John (Käre John), a fine Swedish film of the 1960s which allowed us to see intercourse standing up, against a tree, practised by a couple who had known each other for barely an hour. I remember, because it made a great impression on me, the expression of pleasure on the face of the protagonist. I am speaking of a time when it was assumed that a woman “performed her conjugal duty” because she had no choice, no other way of procreating having been invented until then. Dear John threw female desire in our faces, the need a woman has to be touched, explored and loved. With Bergman, this Swedish cinema put the female orgasm on screen, and on the agenda. Many men and women, women above all, discovered there that coital pleasure existed, and that it was desirable and licit to reach it without having to pass through the “sacred bond of marriage”.

Sex as communication — and American “official sex”

The cinema also taught us that sexual intercourse serves as an element of communication. Alain Resnais showed us this in Hiroshima mon amour, where a couple of different races and languages communicate through genitality. Here again is reinforced the possibility of interracial sex, which Puccini had posed with a great many doubts in his opera Madame Butterfly, giving this kind of practice a tragic and hardly encouraging ending.

At the very time when European cinema was opening our eyes and inviting us to enjoy physical pleasure and intercourse, American cinema was therefore echoing official sex, the sex I define as heterosexual, conjugal, monogamous and reproductive, and flooding us with films of sugary virgins, whose goddesses were Doris Day and June Allyson. Later on, American cinema redeemed itself, paying for its clumsiness.

The 1970s: growing used to eroticism, then the irruption of pornography

The cinema of the 1970s brought us a habituation to eroticism and to sexuality. Almost every film that reached us included its dose of coital sex. That decade gave us films as beautiful as In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no corrida), Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna), Barbarella and Saturday Night Fever, in which a “sexed” and slightly exhibitionist John Travolta made many a vagina wet in the darkened stalls of cinemas the world over.

The masterpiece of that decade is without any doubt Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi), in which Bertolucci offers us a Maria Schneider and a Marlon Brando having intercourse in an empty flat, on the floor itself, in a bathtub, using butter to help with anal penetration, and with a masturbatory ending in the middle of a ballroom.

While European cinema was exploring sexual matters with seriousness and depth, Argentine cinema, and above all Brazilian cinema, was characterised by the pornochanchadas, in which Porcel and Olmedo appear as the representatives of a curious approach to the sexual behaviour of Argentines. What is presented there are perpetually frustrated men, who never get as far as intercourse, faced with beautiful women who shy away from that kind of activity. I think this phenomenon deserves a more thorough analysis, so complex and strange is it. On the one hand, the claim is to show that we men live obsessed with coital sex, and particularly with the generous backsides of our countrywomen, who systematically refuse to satisfy them. It looks as though the aim were to ridicule coital encounters outside marriage and to demonstrate that all that is frustrating and hardly pleasant. But I do not want to go deeper into this phenomenon here, even though I remain willing to discuss it and to think about it with anyone who might provide leads for a broader study.

Let us stay, then, in the 1970s, the decade in which pornography, pornographic films, leave the safe intimacy of home “super 8” projectors to invade the big screens of commercial cinema.

As spectators, we enter the bed, the mouth and the vagina of the protagonists of these gymnastic and coital feats. We were allowed to see the Deep Throat women, capable of swallowing penises of a size the most fertile imaginations had not dreamed of, and to spy, Behind the Green Door, on stories such as that of Story of O (Histoire d’O) and of other heroines and heroes of exhibitionist and paid coital activity.

The 1980s: from refined eroticism to the divine desacralised

From the Boléro to violence

The 1980s, which we have just left behind, gave us deep and sometimes violent erotic and visual pleasures. They offered us the refinement of a Bo Derek, whom we saw — and envied — enjoying intercourse with Dudley Moore, accompanied by Ravel’s Boléro, which has been called, since that film, 10. That music has become a sexual symbol, or rather a coital symbol, for it is difficult not to remember the two actors in bed while listening to it; or not to hold on to the eroticism deployed by Jorge Donn when he danced to it in Les Uns et les Autres, that interesting film by Claude Lelouch.

From that fine eroticism, full of humour, we moved on to the violent and manic eroticism of Fatal Attraction, in which Michael Douglas pays dearly for a weekend of extramarital intercourse with Glenn Close. Despite a moralising ending, which shores up official sex and condemns the violation of monogamy, we cannot fail to acknowledge the “healthy attraction” that the memory of the intercourse in the lift and of the one against the kitchen sink, while water runs from the taps, produces in us.

The end of the decade brought us a sophisticated film which opened for us the hidden and secret doors of desire and of the imagination. We saw Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke live and experience, over 9½ Weeks (Nine ½ Weeks), the most creative sensual and sexual pleasures, combining food, mystery, discovery, submission and domination, in the most explosive and most pleasurable acts of intercourse ever filmed and shown to the public. The homosexual fantasy also appears in this film. But of homosexuality we shall speak further on.

Recently, the same director as 9½ Weeks offered us another sample of eroticism with Two Moon Junction. Here it is no doubt women who most enjoyed the image and most stimulated their fantasy, taken with the indisputable beauty and the sexuality of the male protagonist; although Mickey Rourke brought his own as well, and it is great and very particular, in the film mentioned above.

Sexuality and divinity: two scandals

The 1980s include, to my mind, two important cinematographic landmarks in matters of sexuality. The first is Hail Mary (Je vous salue, Marie), by Jean-Luc Godard, in which he presents us with a Mary, mother of God, who is not a virgin and who enjoys carnal pleasures: the film provoked such alarm and scandal that we were unable to see it in any Latin American country.

The second event is The Last Temptation of Christ, in which Scorsese presents us with a Christ-man, with sexual desires and fantasies, who loves his cousin Mary Magdalene, marries her and has several children with her. This proves the importance and the impact of the cinema: the book The Last Temptation of Christ had been written by Nikos Kazantzakis in the 1950s and had struck me, for my part, as heavy and boring; whereas the film, for its part, pleased me a great deal.

If the 1980s allowed us to explore and to become acquainted with earthly sexual pleasure and eroticism, they did not entirely open for us the doors to the exploration and the contestation of the supposed divine “asexuality”.

Homosexuality in the cinema

Another of the fields into which the cinema of the 1980s ventured is that of homosexuality. Films such as La Cage aux Folles I and II allowed us to look, with humour and without too many prejudices, into the life of a group of human beings who feel and who have needs like so many others, and from whom they differ only in their handling of the sexual stimulus. The gentle and moving ending of La Cage aux Folles II, where Ugo Tognazzi does not hesitate to risk his life to go and fetch his companion, is a whole lesson in love and in companionship.

In the same humorous vein, but with a far deeper and more reflective content, Blake Edwards offers us a Victor Victoria that blurs our erotic and sexual leanings and triggers, in the same way that a cross-dressed Julie Andrews blurred those of James Garner, to the point where he ended up attaching no importance to the sex of the person who had awakened his attraction and his passion. It was not the first time Blake Edwards had taken up the question of homosexuality: he had already touched on it tangentially in 10, but with a certain dramatism, through the character of Dudley Moore’s agent and impresario.

What is perhaps the deepest and most complete thing in this field was presented by French cinema, at the end of the 1980s, in a film entitled Maurice, in which James Ivory recreates the book by Edward Morgan Forster, written in 1913 and published only in 1971, years after its author’s death. This tender film shows the love of two English homosexual adolescents and the problems they face on account of loving each other. The intimate and respectful treatment of the subject opened up for us possibilities of understanding and of acceptance.

It is evident that the cinema has concerned itself with the question of homosexuality far more than that, including female homosexuality, whether veiled and latent, as in Julia, or circumstantial, as in The Color Purple. All this has helped us to hear, to accept and to understand, a little better at least, the legitimacy and the right to choose the kind of partner one desires.

The decade’s balance sheet

Although the 1980s were unable to overcome the barriers that surround the analysis of the relation between sex and religion, between sex and divinity, they left important traces in films such as Agnes of God, The Thorn Birds, The Cardinal and, more recently, El juicio, in which the homosexual and paedophile tendencies of a group of priests are analysed. Despite these limits, the balance sheet of the 1980s is highly positive: the cinema demystified, popularised and encouraged the search for a human sexual and coital encounter without reproductive aim. It showed the legitimacy of having erotic fantasies and the right to satisfy them. That mass medium which is the cinema has been an ally of Pleasure.

The 1990s: the right of disabled people to pleasure

The 1990s open with an interesting proposal in matters of sexuality: the right of disabled people to sexual enjoyment. We have already mentioned Jane Fonda and her act of intercourse with Jon Voight in Coming Home, but the current proposals are a little more explicit and go deeper. In My Left Foot, the protagonist, a disabled man who can move only his left foot, seduces a beautiful woman and marries her. In Born on the Fourth of July, the current symbol of male sensuality, Tom Cruise, a war invalid and impotent, seeks to satisfy himself and to satisfy his sexual partner with his mouth, in an exploration by saliva and tongue of her whole body, ending in a successful and orgasmic cunnilingus.

The cinema is opening up new paths, which will allow us to explore the forgotten, denied and unrecognised sexuality of disabled people.