“FIGHTING AND
FUCKING WERE
THE TWO THINGS
BATTLING FOR
SUPREMACY
AT THE
NICKELODEON.”
has held the attention of generations of women, in part for
its its simmering, female-centric gaze on Patrick Swayze.
You can also find lesbian coming-of-age story Pariah, an
early film by Mudbound director Dee Rees, about both the
difficulties and the joys of actualising desire.
The thing is, researching the BFI season made it clear
to me that this preoccupation isn’t invisible, just that it
ebbs and flows across different eras. After all, one of the
first things committed to celluloid was a passionate kiss- the then-risqué 1896 Thomas Edison short lasted for
less than 20 seconds. On the other hand, some of the very
first motion pictures were of boxing matches. So there you
have it: fighting and fucking were the two things battling for
supremacy at the nickelodeon. Before the rise of Hollywood
censorship in the 1930s, movies featured free love and
motherhood out of wedlock. In the ’90s, shlocky erotic
thrillers attained a level of commercial success that had
studios rethinking how they could package and sell sex.
But these days, and for a multitude of reasons, our
cinema has been remarkably sexless. We can speculate
as to why this is, and I’d hazard a guess that it concerns
the ready availability of internet porn of vast variety and
quantity. Sex has largely been separated from art, or at least
screen art. The positive force of MeToo, and the ongoing
aftermath of the Weinstein scandal, has taken centre stage,
focusing our collective interests on bringing to light the
terrible abuses of the film industry. Consensual, enjoyable
sexual desire has rather understandably retreated to the
sidelines for now: put simply, no one was in the mood.
Maybe now more than ever, women deserve to get that
thirst back and to enjoy it – to find something positive, or
at least active, about our relationship to sex on screen.
That doesn’t mean desire is straightforward or untroubled
by reality – the prevailing powers-that-be in film have
never made sex uncomplicated for us in the way that it so
often is for men. Nonetheless, there is something implicitly
thrilling about breaking age-old taboos on what it means
to talk seriously about films. It’s time we were able to
discuss complicated ideas about audience identification,
the camera’s gaze, and the sensuality that’s intrinsic to
movies. In short: it’s high time women were able to quench
their thirst. So drink up
‘She Found it at the Movies: Women Writers on Sex, Desire
and Cinema’ is published by Red Press and available to
purchase from 31 March. BFI THIRST season runs from
1 April at BFI Southbank, London.038 The Promising Young Woman Issue