From a Time magazine review of the new Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez shlock-o-rama Grindhouse, here’s an observation that I found interesting:
You won’t find sex, or even the aura of sexuality, in films by the current generation of pop-referencing auteurs. They swarm all over the violence in 60s-70s grindhouse movies but are squeamish in showing the eroticism that once was crucial to the genre. The generation of “kids with beards,” as Billy Wilder called Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, took their cues from a wide range of movie sources — Saturday-matinee serials, John Cassavetes improv dramas, European angst-athons — and if they got excessive, it was in kitsch and violence, not sex. Rodriguez got some puffs of grindhouse steam going in Sin City; but here, he and Tarantino are as puritanical as their predecessors. All bang-bang, no French kiss-kiss.
In both “features” of Grindhouse, the MISSING REEL card flashes as a sex scene has just begun. That’s a comment on the old days, but it also proves that when it comes to eroticism, of the true or even exploitation variety, these directors are such cowards. If they use sex at all, it is in the horror-film mode pioneered by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Show a woman in a shower, then kill her. The impulse is both prurient and puritanical; they provide a brief voyeuristic pleasure, then feel obliged to punish the women, and the audience, and themselves.
This reminds me of something I noticed when I worked at the multiplex back in college: the viewers who squawked with moral outrage and demanded refunds at the briefest glimpse of a feminine nipple were usually the same folks who enthusiastically turned out on opening night for the latest action or horror bloodbaths. One family of regular patrons stands out in my mind; the numb-skulled parents thought it was peachy keen to take their five kids — who, as I recall, ranged in age from teen down to toddler — to Total Recall three or four times, but were appalled that their precious younglings’ eyes were exposed to the sexual content in The Fabulous Baker Boys. Both films were rated R and, in my opinion, were inappropriate for kids regardless of their respective particulars, simply because they dealt with grown-up subject matter. (Well, Baker Boys did, anyway, but Total Recall definitely wasn’t made with families in mind, regardless of its subject.) But these folks thought that Michael Ironside getting his arms ripped off (“See you at the pahty, Ricktah!”) was fine family entertainment while Michelle Pfeiffer’s boobage was the very embodiment of evil.
I was thinking then that there was something out of whack with the cultural values being expressed through our entertainment, the dichotomy of “immoral” sexual content versus “perfectly acceptable” violence, and that was almost 20 years ago. The equation has only gotten more lopsided since then; our theater screens are awash in gore and sadism, but I honestly can’t recall the last time I saw any nudity in a film… what is it about Americans that we prefer fake bloodshed over cinematic nookie? And does that make anyone else out there uneasy, or is it just me?
