Rep Diary: Valentine’s Day Massacre
We Won't Grow Old Together
By some accounts, Saint Valentine was an early Christian priest who, after offending Emperor Claudius II, was beaten, stoned, and then beheaded. Many people feel something similar is happening to them each Valentine’s Day. It is to these lonely, sulking, love-weary souls that Anthology Film Archives devotes one of my favorite annual series, the Valentine’s Day Massacre. A celebration of cinematic anti-romance, this year's four films––We Won’t Grow Old Together (72), Possession (81), Modern Romance (81), and Minnie and Moskowitz (71)—were a prime opportunity to look further afield and count the ways in which love can trap, horrify, infuriate, and debilitate us.
What would an investigation of love’s pitfalls be without a descent into the very worst that concupiscence has to offer? Cinema, after all, has a rich history of depicting sex as gross, unfulfilling, alienating, and repellent; a category I’ll call anti-romantic sex.* (It remains to be seen what label might apply to Gaspar Noé’s forthcoming Love, screening this week in Cannes, though if 2002's Irreversible is any clue, it won’t all be chocolate and roses.) Anthology’s Valentine’s Day gift puts on display a counterpoint to the hapless sex we are accustomed to seeing in movies, in which a man and a woman fall gracefully from kiss to the missionary position, hair and makeup undisturbed, and miraculously orgasm in unison. As with the most interesting aesthetic categories, the positive criteria are less tangible than the negative ones: Titanic (97) was a celebration of bad sex, the kind that exemplifies the Danielle Steel, wonder-bread American doublethink of wanting to be stimulated without having to admit you like softcore pornography. Sex of this sort is a candlelit parade of delicate insinuation at the expense of honesty or insight. More often, however, sex is simply boring: was there sex in Dallas Buyers Club (yes, straight sex), or 50 Shades of Gray? Was it memorable?
Good sex on film is none of this. It is the sort that hides nothing for the sake of modesty. It feels essential to the whole of the film: we’d be missing something crucial about the characters and the world they inhabit if we didn’t actually see this act in all its detail. The Valentine’s Day Massacre is, for a series on love, rather light on sex. We Won’t Grow Old Together, Modern Love, and Minnie and Moskowitz allude to it, and in many ways we suspect that it is the unseen elastic that continues to snap these dysfunctional couples together, but the sex itself remains off screen. Not so for Possession, which is aptly billed by Anthology as a “batshit crazy depiction of an imploding marriage.” Here we have one of the most grotesque metaphorical depictions of infidelity in cinema: husband (Sam Neill) catches wife (Isabelle Adjani) making love to a half-formed demon-monster that she has been secretly constructing while her marriage falls apart. It’s a perverse cuckold fantasy—the wife isn’t simply cheating on you but is being violated by a malevolent supernatural force. Think about that the next time your spouse is home late from work.
Desperate Living
But body horror is only the beginning of a whole taxonomy of sex gone wrong. The lightest form of sexual anti-romance is the sort that pokes fun. It strips away the gentle sighs or the flattering lighting and reminds you that sex is often either absurd or mundane. It’s the kind that takes on the mainstream doublethink and says “oh, so you do like watching sex right?”—then proceeds to show much more than you bargained for. John Waters masters this, with his kitschy anti-aesthetic, corpulent, and bony characters, and their incomprehensible paraphilias––the man can make anything seem sexual, even smothering someone to death, as Grizelda (Jean Hill) does in Desperate Living (77). Roy Andersson does something similar in You, the Living (07), by making us watch a rotund old woman wearing a Pickelhaube screw her tiny husband while he laments about losing his retirement savings.
A personal favorite example of the mundane imposing itself into sexual fantasy is A Taxing Woman, Juzo Itami’s droll 1987 mockery of crime thrillers, bureaucracy, and the Yakuza. The star of the show may be the inscrutable, middle-aged tax-fraud investigator Ryoko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto) who is neither married nor courts romance, but her nemesis, the tawdry, ebullient gangster Hideki Gondo (Tsutomu Yamazaki), has one of his best moments between the sheets. Gondo and his mistress are in bed at his house and, as with most of the movie, everything is played straight: the dark lighting, the woman underneath shrieking in ecstasy, the tastefully placed sheets. But seconds after they both climax, Gondo reaches off camera, grabs a fistful of tissues, and inserts them between his partner’s legs. It forces one to think “Is this guy really that worried about his sheets? Could he be more of an asshole?”—a question which is addressed immediately when he commands his mistress to grab some important business documents before she has even caught her breath. In a jab at the traditional postcoital booty shot, we watch the lover walk into the light with the tissues swaying along with her hips, shattering any illusion of eroticism the moment had left.
Then there are the sex scenes where we aren’t laughing, which are sadder and more unsettling. These show us two characters genuinely trying to connect but failing. It is the sort that is hinted at in Synecdoche, New York (08), when Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard starts crying while undressing, muttering “I’m sorry” all the way into bed with Tammy (Emily Watson). The impenetrable loneliness of both characters is made real by their lack of passion, warmth, or intimacy. Oshima’s notorious, cryptic meditation on power and obsession, In the Realm of the Senses (76), is rife with these moments: virtually two hours of unsimulated sex scenes, none of which are erotic. The immediacy and inevitability of the sex forces you to anatomize it: why are they doing this, or that? What is going on in their heads? It takes the vapid psychology of pornography, in which the inner lives of the participants are wholly suppressed to produce the commodity of pleasure, and reverses it: pleasure is dissected so relentlessly and extirpated of gratification that we're forced to examine the character’s minds.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
One of the greatest examples of this mold of sex comes from Nicolas Roeg, a fixture in articles about movie sex for Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland’s performance as a bereaved couple in Don’t Look Now (73). That scene conveys their simmering desperation, lust, and endurance. But it’s in The Man Who Fell to Earth (76) that Roeg’s genius for giving sex its full emotional and narrative import is truly demonstrated, as part of a shattered, bitter, inexhaustible romance.
The result is spectacular, even in description: an emaciated David Bowie, who plays an alien, engages in various sexual acts, some involving fellating a gun that shoots blanks (let that sit in), with a former lover who has left him for his best friend. She is caked in makeup and hairspray. Both are sloppy, drunk, and lacking in grace, and shrieking things like “oh yeah, in your ear,” “bite it,” and “I’m rich, I can afford anything” between licking each others tongues and clumsily rolling about. The editing is disjointed, the lighting harsh; the cloying song “Hello, Mary Lou” echoes in the background. The scene begins with Bowie’s alien Thomas Jerome Newton threatening her with the gun before she realizes it is a fake, and after it ends, there is not a glimmer of joy left in the movie, despite there being almost 30 minutes left. Perhaps the most devastating part of the scene is the fact that the characters are doing all this willingly. Their coupling was their genuine attempt to recover something that died and festered long ago. After watching this, even if you thought you might have wanted to have sex ever again, it will at the very least cause you to seriously doubt your motives.
* Missing from this taxonomy is queer sexuality. In the past few decades we’ve seen more men at least getting at it, but often it’s as vapid as bad straight sex. It titillates but doesn’t embarrass, disquiet, or repulse us. Almodovar, however, will always have a special place in my heart for showing Gael Garcia Bernal as an homme fatale reluctantly bottoming in Bad Education (04).
