| I figured I’d be the last person to have a problem watching people fuck on screen. Maybe it was because it was 10 in the morning and I’m off caffeine but watching a naked guy lie on his back and curl his legs over his head so he could suck on his own dick and then ejaculate into his own mouth somehow wasn’t the best start to my day.
I was watching an advance screening of Shortbus, the much-talked-about new film by director John Cameron Mitchell (star and director of the drag film and cult classic Hedwig and the Angry Inch), set for release next week in most major cities across Canada.
I’d read enough to know the film was chock full of sex, and not your simulated, body-double, close-up-shot-of-a-hand-clenching-indicating-orgasm Hollywood-style sex. This was gonna be the real deal. Real actors, really fucking.
Five minutes, and three ejaculations in, the film certainly lived up to its "sexually explicit" hype. Another 102 minutes of straight, gay and group fucking, some light BDSM scenes and a smattering of self-pleasure cemented the film’s sordid reputation as the most sexually explicit film ever to get mainstream release.
As a flag-waver for sexual freedom who regularly bitches about how uptight we are when it comes to sex and nudity, I should have been cheering in my seat. Instead, I was squirming, and not in a good way.
Turns out I don’t really care to see real actors having real sex. Who knew?
Time called the film unmissable, adding that "it could be called the first middle-class porno movie."
Except I’m good with watching porn actors have real sex. I guess because I know why they’re doing it. To get me off. If they were simulating the sex, well, it wouldn’t work.
And Mitchell himself has gone out of his way in several interviews to state that Shortbus is not porn. In an interview about his film in the New York Times, Mitchell says, "The purpose of pornography is to arouse, whereas here, he said, "the priority is the emotional life of the characters. Why can't we not focus on sex, as porn does, but make sex part of the film?"
But that’s the problem I had with Shortbus. The sex wasn’t just part of the film. It was the main character.
The oh-so-lovely screen legend Catherine Deneuve has said that nudity is an unnecessary distraction in movies and urges directors to create more imaginative ways to convey love on the big screen without asking their cast to strip naked.
"Even as a spectator," she’s been quoted as saying, "I find it really hard to watch nude scenes, because I see only the person, not the character."
Now I know she’s old school (and maybe I am, too) but that’s what I was thinking when I watched the sex in Shortbus.
I was constantly distracted from the "emotional life of the characters" because I was too busy thinking about what it must have been like for these actors to have sex with a virtual stranger (none of them knew each other before filming) on camera.
Obviously, sexuality is the central theme of Shortbus, the film’s title being the name of a carnivalesque New York salon where a colourful cast of social misfits go to perform, discuss politics, play spin the bottle and fuck. And it wasn’t the Salon fucking that bothered me as much. It was the sex between the characters.
I don’t generally look to Julia Roberts for her profound insights, but a quote I came across from her about why she doesn’t do nudity in films made a good point.
"For me, personally... to act with my clothes on is a performance; to act with my clothes off is a documentary," she said.
If Shortbus was a documentary, then it might make sense to show real couples having real sex. But these actors were playing couples. If we believed them acting as couples, why wouldn’t we be able to make the same leap if they were acting the sex.
I generally enjoyed Shortbus. Great characters; great performances. It was both funny and at times, poignant ("It’s just like the ’60s but with less hope." says the salon's charming host about the general malaise of the salon’s patrons).
And it was brave and edgy for Mitchell to literally bare all on film but, beyond the shock value, I’m not sure it added much. Because no matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to capture the emotions of sex on film (one of the problems with porn). Only the people having the sex are privy to that.
In response to the many questions the press has put to him about the explicitness of the film, Mitchell has been quoted as saying that "most people don’t even remember the sex at the end of the film because they were swept up in the story."
I don’t usually like to encourage this when it comes to sex, but if that’s the case, then why not let the actors fake it? |
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