because sex in mainstream movies is dead.
good article here on why that is.
the whole thing is worth reading, but i excerpted the critical stuff below.
https://freebeacon.com/culture/where-have-all-sex-scenes-gone/
Where Have All the Sex Scenes Gone?
On the cultural and commercial forces conspiring against onscreen horniness
First off, there's the commercial factor. It's expensive to release movies in theaters, and I don't mean because of production budgets: Anything opening wide requires a low-to-mid-eight-figure ad buy, at least, more if you really want to pop on that opening weekend. The increased cost of advertising means fewer films get released in general, and those few need to be home runs, not singles. And it's harder to hit a home run with an R-rated movie than a PG-13-rated movie.
(Congrats: You're caught up on the last 30 years or so of the theatrical exhibition business.)
A PG-13 movie isn't just easier to sell in America; it's also easier to sell overseas—particularly in China, where films forbid all sorts of things. Ghosts, weirdly. Depictions of homosexuality. And nudity is a no-go too. So, if you want to try and recoup any of your investment in the Middle Kingdom, better make sure you're not going to have too many nude scenes to cut out.
Indeed, discomfort with sex lines up nicely with the rise of the comic book movie and the sexless action flick. Writing all the way back in 1976—practically a hedonistic paradise compared with now—Pauline Kael highlighted the rise of the cop movie and the ways in which police partnerships subbed in for real romantic relationships. "It doesn't have the hidden traps of the relationship between man and women, or between lovers of the same sex," Kael wrote in "Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences." "Two human beings who are sexually and emotionally involved cause pain to each other, and it takes more skill than most writers and directors have to deal with that pain."
Why bother showing men and women connecting emotionally and sexually when you can rake in billions by having Steve Rogers and Tony Stark punch aliens—or, occasionally, each other?
Commercial factors aren't the only reason for the shift. There's a critical and cultural component as well.
Like time, Twitter is a flat circle. If you're on the social media service long enough, you'll see the same tweets go viral, the same arguments flare up, the same rebuttals be offered, the same dunks thundered home with Dr. J-like authority. One such circularity on Film Twitter, our modern Cahiers du Cinéma, goes a little like this: A Zoomer will say with supreme confidence that no movie has ever needed or been improved by a sex scene, which will receive tens of thousands of likes and retweets from similarly puritanical Letterboxd scholars. This will, in turn, result in an exhausted Gen Xer or Elderly Millennial or even the occasional Boomer to screenshot the offending tweet and retort, "How could modern movies be any more sexless, you freaks have already won, no one in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ever even contemplated sex, every birth that has ever happened in that realm is virginal."
My cohort of The Olds is correct, of course, but it often makes me grimace a bit. Because the Zoomers are simply living in the intellectual world we made for them. What did we think would happen when we spent decades screaming about The Male Gaze and how film's treatment of women inherently objectifies them?
Briefly: "The male gaze" is a critical theory promulgated by Laura Mulvey suggesting that the patriarchy and its cinematic extension was, by its nature, kinda creepy. "The extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world," Mulvey wrote in her classic essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative in Cinema." "Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on to the performer."
In short: We (that is, men) are conditioned to make and watch and force upon society movies with nudity because it's the only socially acceptable way we can act like a Peeping Tom.
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AP (5259)
2 years ago
Weirdly enough, it seems the sex scene has gone to TV now that streaming and cable are pretty comfortable with nudity.
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