Are sex scenes ‘unnecessary’? Do they really have to just… show everything?
It’s a sentiment showing up increasingly in the past few years, but it’s hardly surprising. A widespread sanitising is taking place in film and culture, and perceptions are being shifted. We are experiencing the era of the sexless film.
Yet sex in cinema can have purpose, meaning – are we really doing a service to our sensibilities by placing limitations? Intimacy on screen taps into our innate sense of the emotional and the romantic. It can inform character pathology, contemplate politics of the body. The conclusion of that being ‘unnecessary’ is short-sighted and further defines our window of permitted ideas.
Derek McArthur: Why should Poor Things care about Glasgow when we don’t?
The depiction of sex is something of a free speech issue. It’s no coincidence that the Hays Code, the strict studio guidelines meant to preserve the “moral standards” of the filmgoing public, crumbled with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Studios exerting such a tight grip on what an adult majority could see and what filmmakers could express for decades is now beyond belief, but this self-censoring still exists. The Hays Code came into action from fear of government intervention, but today’s censors........