Make Hollywood Horny Again
Revisiting a time when sex was bad for you (but you wanted it anyway).
how’s this for a fantasy: It’s 1988, and you pick up a copy of Mother Jones to read about Fatal Attraction, the blockbuster everyone’s been obsessively discussing. Glenn Close stars as Alex Forrest, a hot, successful book editor who can wear a full-length leather trench coat like a dark angel. She meets Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas), and after one weekend of hot sex, she’s smitten and he’s out the door. What happens next is probably 100 minutes of a man’s worst nightmare: the woman who will not go away. The woman who threatens his happy domestic life with his beautiful wife and child, though he jeopardized it in the first place. The woman who boils the fluffy bunny as casually as she would cook a box of Annie’s Mac & Cheese. ¶ The article begins with a 16-year-old girl who worked at a movie theater and watched grown men scream, “Beat that bitch! Kill her off now!” when Close was onscreen. A little further down, you read all about the film’s labyrinthine journey from an idea to a blockbuster. How James Dearden’s original script entered development as a sympathetic portrayal of a single woman until studio execs turned it into the story of a villainous, largely unsympathetic psycho. And then you get to this quote from the film’s director, Adrian Lyne, explaining his take on Alex and her real-life counterparts: single women in publishing who live in studio apartments in New York:
They are … sort of overcompensating for not being men. It’s sad, you know, because it kind of doesn’t work. You hear feminists talk, and the last 10, 20 years, you hear women talking about fucking men rather than being fucked, to be crass about it. It’s kind of unattractive, however liberated and emancipated it is. It kind of fights the whole wife role, the whole
childbearing role. Sure you got your career and your success but you are not fulfilled as a woman.
My wife has never worked. She’s the least ambitious person I’ve ever met. She’s a terrific wife. She hasn’t the slightest interest in doing a career. She kind of lives this with me, and it’s a terrific feeling. I come home, and she’s there.
Well! Despite that quote (or maybe because of it), Lyne’s movies went on to become box-office hits and define a genre, one that maintained the same casual misogyny as his interview, naturally. By the early ’90s, he had cemented his reputation as the erotic-thriller guy (9½ Weeks, Indecent Proposal, Unfaithful). The politics of those films never got less icky, but they remained enormously popular before flaming out entirely by the early aughts. And how could you not watch them? They were fun and thrilling and taboo and made for and about adults entangled in very adult situations that allowed them to express their sexual desires. Those expressions were maximalist, surprising, ridiculous, problematic, violent acts of straight-up wild fucking, like Michael Douglas and Glenn Close going at it on the edge of a kitchen counter while she splashes her nipples with water from the sink. Or Demi Moore in a threesome with Woody Harrelson and piles of dollar bills (Indecent Proposal). Or Linda Fiorentino riding Peter Berg, her “designated fuck,” against a chain-link fence without taking off her heels (The Last Seduction).
There were so many saxophones, so many extremely long sequences of thrusting against refrigerators or office desks or concrete walls outside buildings. Entwined bodies became wrecking balls, destroying beds and kitchens and anything—physical, emotional, philosophical—in their path.
Now it’s 2022, and Lyne and his soapy psychosexual dramas are back in the public consciousness. In March, he released his first film in 20 years, Deep Water, an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel about a snail-loving husband tortured by the high-stakes sex games his wife likes to play: basically a perfect movie on paper. Even though there were signs of trouble— multiple delays until eventually they bagged the theatrical release altogether—the combination of Lyne, a big budget, and two real,
shiny movie stars (Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas) on the marquee seemed to signal a true rebirth of the genre. I wanted to see it, then I wanted to go to dinner and talk about it, then I wanted to go home and bone about it in a way that was maybe inspired by what I’d watched. And I wanted it to be good. Was I asking too much? Absolutely not. We deserved this. It had been so long. But Deep Water didn’t end the dry spell. The first part of the movie establishes that Melinda (de Armas), a neo–femme fatale, loves dangling her himbo lovers in front of her quietly suffering husband, Vic (Affleck). All of Lyne’s musty moralizing is still here. Sure, it’s an open marriage that seems to prioritize Melinda’s sexual desires, but the movie’s Greek chorus of men chalk it up to her hysteria. The ins and outs of their (onesided, it appears) open marriage go from intriguingly vague to murky real fast, so by the time Vic and Melinda go at it, there’s none of the tension that makes these kinds of scenes pop. It’s a sex scene that suggests the movie is afraid of sex. There is no foreplay, no luxuriating in the act, nothing that feels remotely kinky. (They try: Melinda asks Vic to “kiss my ass,” a weak gesture toward anilingus.) You can’t tell who is in control or what this sex means in the construct of their thing (is it a hate fuck? A reconciliatory fuck?). Deep Water doesn’t deliver the two elements that make the genre amazing: hot sex and high-stakes thrills that complicate how we feel about the hot sex. It was that special blend that made an erotic thriller an erotic thriller. Even when they were regressive, even when they compelled assholes to scream sexist tirades at the screen, the genre offered a window into society’s sexual anxieties. Fatal Attraction ends when Dan’s wife, Beth (Anne Archer), kills Alex in self-defense. As the credits roll, the camera lingers on a family photo on their mantle indicating all is right. The single woman is dead, and the family unit will survive. Yet the film’s eroticism also came from the idea that the accepted power balance, and everything associated with it, was sitting on a precipice. Everything could go off a cliff with the flick of a red-nailed finger. So the sex had to be really fucking good to justify risking all that in the first place. The lure of the erotic thriller isn’t just in watching sex onscreen—if I want that, I can find it. What I’m missing is the feeling that the sex is not just an act but a manifestation of something we aren’t supposed to acknowledge about the ways pleasure intersects with pain and power. These films dislodged something in the cultural psyche of the era, reflecting the concerns, fears, and politics (good and bad) of the yuppies in the audience. They genuinely turned viewers on and genuinely terrified them. The good thing, for erotic-thriller fans, is that many of the conversations these movies provoked are more unfinished than we like to think.
on any given Friday in 1992, you could choose from a selection of erotic thrillers that rivaled the number of options on a diner menu. You could see Basic Instinct (the Platonic ideal of erotic thrillers), Damage (Jeremy Irons as a British politician who has an illicit affair with his son’s fiancée, Juliette Binoche), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (crazy nanny tries to kill wife, seduce husband, steal baby), or Single White Female (crazy roommate tries to kill other roommate, steal her life, maybe seduce her too if the filmmakers weren’t cowards). An embarrassment of horny and problematic content. This was the peak of the genre. People knew exactly what to expect when they sat down in the cloth-covered movie-theater seats with their popcorn, waiting patiently through trailers: a slightly trashy (or fully trashy), cheap-to-make movie that only existed to tell a story about sex, seduction, and power. These movies were sometimes referred to as “one-handed watchers,” films that were propelled by sex, not just films with sex in them. The settings were lush, opulent, urban (S.F., NYC, L.A.) or a train ride away from urban (the suburbs). They were almost exclusively made by white men (a handful of them, specifically Lyne, Paul Verhoeven, and Joe Eszterhas) and about upper-middle-class, straight white people and their preoccupations; you could generally expect to see Michael Douglas (or a similar kind of male movie star) get led around by his dick while a fantastically dressed variation on the femme fatale had her way with him until she got punished for it in some way (usually death). These women are what make the films memorable. They say things like “Fuck me, give it to me, I want this, I want that, don’t stop”—all vocal consent and a healthy understanding of their desires (necessary when so much of the sex in these movies is tinged with violence). No matter how good the postcoital conversations about the movies were (and they were good—they sparked excellent controversies and protests and debates), the box office reflected a waning popularity by 1995. You can blame the long dry period that followed on one movie. “Showgirls made a real change in the culture,” explains Karina Longworth, the host of the podcast You Must Remember This, whose new season focuses on the history of sex in Hollywood movies of the ’80s and ’90s. Elizabeth
Berkley’s flail-acting and the over-the-top “How did his dick not break?” sex scenes pushed the genre into the realm of parody. Critics hated it, and it tanked at the box office. “I don’t think we can understate how it made even the idea of going to see a movie like that so uncool,” Longworth says. The hangover lasted so long she’s not sure if a serious attempt at an erotic thriller could be received earnestly anymore. “I don’t know if you can still be as enraptured by an erotic thriller the way it demands you be. I don’t know if people can not laugh at those things now.” it’s possible that tastes have changed too much. I love erotic thrillers deeply, but even I can admit these movies are corny. On rewatch, the classics feel out of step with our modern self-awareness; they take themselves and their seductions so seriously. Indecent Proposal’s pile-of-money sex scene is hot for the first ten seconds, then the camera lingers forever as Sade’s “No Ordinary Love” swells. 9½ Weeks tried to make emptying the contents of your fridge onto your lover’s body extremely sexy, and at the time, nobody seemed to think it was a bad idea to use Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” during a seduction. The nostalgia bath of it all allows us to enjoy these movies while distancing ourselves from their shortcomings. The focus on white hetero men and their hangups. The inability to deal with queerness (Bound is an exception) or race (there is no exception). Filmmakers got away with misogyny in a way that would ignite Twitter today. Enjoying Indecent Proposal meant buying into an underlying assertion: “That rich white man is powerful and therefore should get to have sex with Demi Moore.” It’s easy to smugly acknowledge how outof-date these movies are. What was considered shocking was rooted in the kinds of topics that dominated dinner parties in 1991. Most people didn’t have the language to discuss slut shaming or male anxiety over women’s erotic power the way we do now. It was a more sexually conservative climate, one in which the aids epidemic had led to increased moralizing about sex. Because everything feels so dated, it’s difficult to see the organic libidinousness that existed at the time.
It’s also just easier to look backward. Because we’ve stopped being able to talk about sex—actual fleshy, part-to-part, carnal enjoyment of sex—seriously. (You could probably trace this back to the Clinton scandal, a controversy that turned the country into prudes.) We can do cultural criticism of sex with deathly seriousness. But it’s hard to have those conversations while being turned on by the act, which is what these films ask us to do: to watch hot sex and have feelings about how messy and fun it can be at once.
To me, it’s clear we still have a use for erotic thrillers. It’s why we keep reconsidering the old ones. Nina K. Martin, eroticthriller scholar and author of Sexy Thrills, has argued that people are nostalgic for the way sex used to be portrayed, and I agree. It’s not that we have a new set of anxieties or taboos to explore (though there are certainly some to add to the list). It’s that we haven’t finished the conversations we were having in 1987. There’s a reluctance in mainstream cinema to discuss the way sex, power, danger, and pleasure are all twisted up in one another; we’re not supposed to acknowledge the ways in which dominance,
everything could go off a cliff with the flick of a red-nailed finger. so the sex had to be good.