What the 2020s need: Sex and romance at the movies
A slight giddiness is overtaking prognosticators as the pandemic nears its end. Economics writers, normally a cautious bunch, are speculating about how a Biden boom might really be different — bigger, longer, its fruits more widely shared. Tech and science watchers are talking about the 2020s as an age of breakthroughs.
But what about culture? If stagnation in the economy has been matched by sterility in artistic pursuits (it has), what would signify cultural acceleration? Here’s one possibility:
We’ll know we’re entering a new era when sex and romance make a comeback at the movies.
Note that I said sex and romance. Traditionally these were somewhat separable movie-industry commodities.
But in the last 15 years the “sex movie” and the romantic comedy have both declined or disappeared. This means that if you’re a proud anti-puritan who misses “adult themes” in your movies or an old-fashioned filmgoer who swoons for true love triumphing, you can reasonably complain that Hollywood isn’t telling your kind of stories.
In the modern blockbuster, as the film writer R.S. Benedict put it: “Everyone is beautiful.
And yet, no one is horny.” Movie stars have never been so ripped and chiseled and godlike; they have to be, if they aspire to play a superhero. But unlike the old Olympians, these gods rarely seem to have the hots for one another.
A lot of different forces have marginalized movie sex and romance. The blockbuster industry has been bad for all kinds of adult movies, because it’s assumed that superhero fight scenes travel better internationally than more complex and culturally specific plots. Some of the audience for sexually themed stories has migrated to cable and streaming services; some of that appetite has been sated by online porn.
In general there’s a cultural void where romance used to be. And it doesn’t seem coincidental that this void opened at a time when the sexes are struggling to pair off — with fewer marriages, fewer relationships, less sex.
Courtship structures, formal in the old days and casual in the 1990s, were always useful to the romantic comedy. But lately even the casual structures have collapsed, with a Darwinian ecosystem of online dating (much less charming in reality than in “You’ve Got Mail”) supplanting older, more cinematic alternatives.
Ideological trends have also made it more challenging to portray happy relations between the sexes. The dramatic material of traditional romance is male and female distinctiveness, but these differences sit uncomfortably with the current progressive emphasis on the interchangeability of the sexes — which may be why the recent cable hits with the most sex or romance have been set in historical and fantasy landscapes, from “Game of Thrones” to “Outlander.”
Just consider the contrast between Netflix’s “Bridgerton,” a multiracial bodice-ripper set in an alternative but safely-past-tense 19th century, and best picture nominee “Promising Young Woman,” set in a present-day dating landscape so bleak it makes you want to cancel heterosexuality.
But maybe the popularity of “Bridgerton” is a foretaste of a very different 2020s. Maybe it’s a sign that an age of libertinism lies just around the corner. Or maybe the show’s concern with married sex is a signpost on the path to a new traditionalism.
Either way, everyone should be rooting for the cinema of desire. For artistic reasons, yes — but also for the sake of the continuation of the human race.