blueeyedgirl said:
"9 Songs" by Michael Winterbottom
That's the movie the article was talking about that Dreadsox stole, I was going to post that
He's always the first one to steal the sex stuff
I would much rather watch real sex that way than in porn. Honestly watching people have sex in a movie really isn't my thing though. Even the simulated sex can seem so awkward and unromantic that it makes me uncomfortable.
Real actors, real sex: an onscreen no-no?
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff | August 21, 2005
That scurrilous Michael Winterbottom. With his new film, the British director of ''Wonderland" and ''24 Hour Party People" has dared to blast the eyes of unwary moviegoers by showing the unshowable, by breaking the ultimate movie taboo, by going where none have gone before.
That's right, ''9 Songs" is about sex between a loving, committed couple.
Well, yes, the couple are actors, a Brit named Kieran O'Brien and an American, Margo Stilley, and their job is to convince us they're in an impassioned and lustful yearlong relationship of the type 20-somethings around the world might recognize. The sex is real and quite explicit, though, and the minor furor surrounding the film -- censorious editorials in the UK and Australia, the British-based Christian Coalition for Traditional Values condemning the film as ''a rank piece of soulless pornography" -- comes from the unaccustomed conjunction of fake characters, real congress, and a ''real" movie.
While a similar dust-up has as yet failed to ignite on this side of the ocean, a casual observer might hope it would. Completely aside from its success as art or entertainment -- on that score, the movie stands as an intriguing idea left frustratingly undeveloped -- ''9 Songs" exposes our nervously accepted notions of how and where sex is to be depicted in popular culture, what constitutes ''fake" sex as opposed to ''real" sex, and the compartmentalization necessary to keep the entire delicate scaffolding from collapsing in an interesting heap.
Since the breakdown of the old studio system in the late 1950s, commercial movies have danced closer and closer around representations of sexuality. Barriers to nudity and behavior have slowly fallen, but sexual activity has remained simulated, even if with increasing frankness. Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider weren't really making love in ''Last Tango in Paris," but the film was extreme enough for viewers to temporarily think so.
After a brief flirtation with post-'60s looseness, though, onscreen coupling in mainstream movies quickly retreated to safer and more reactionary harbors. By the late 1970s, a sexually active teenage girl was simply the next target for Michael Myers's knife in ''Halloween" (1978). These days we can handle comic bawdiness in movies like ''Wedding Crashers," but serious presentations of explicit sexuality get marginalized to art-house theaters (the films of Peter Greenaway, for example) or are jeered off the multiplex screen, like the 2003 Meg Ryan misfire ''In the Cut."
One reason for this state of affairs, obviously, is porn. The emergence of hard-core sex movies from the underground in the early 1970s, their explosion onto home video in the 1980s, and their metastasization onto the Internet in the late 1990s essentially gave Hollywood the escape clause it needed. Since the ''real thing" was readily available if you so chose -- and on increasingly private terms -- the pressure was off commercial movies to compete in prurience. In fact, the pressure was on for them not to. The dirty secret about dirty movies is that audiences feel uncomfortable watching them in a theater full of strangers (or worse, unexpected acquaintances). Home video and the Internet took porn back to the bedroom where it belonged.
But when people think of pornography as ''the real thing," it's of course anything but. There are rules -- of physical appearance, of narrative structure (such as it is), of what act follows what. Because it's product rather than storytelling and has to adhere to the demands of a paying audience, mass-market hard-core has a ritualistically defined beginning, middle, and end. Plus there's all that cheeseball music. Faithful only to baseline anatomy, porn is in many ways more repressive and repressed than mainstream culture.
So it makes sense that movies -- ''real" movies -- are beginning to experiment once more with real sex: If you can show it all and it still doesn't mean anything, what needs to be added for it to have any weight? Art? Plot? Theory? Believable characters? A personal perspective?
All have been tried in recent years. Vincent Gallo capped off 2003's ''Brown Bunny" with actress Chloe Sevigny graphically servicing the director/star -- the results were hooted down at Cannes and have since been defended as extremity in the service of expression. David Mackenzie's ''Young Adam," also from 2003, pushed the limits of simulated sex with Ewan McGregor as a callous rake in 1950s Scotland.
Then there's the French, doing their best to shock the bourgeoisie with the reverse-narrative rape of 2002's ''Irreversible" (in which the man's naughty bits were rendered digitally) and the tiresome eroto-intellectualisms of ''Anatomy of Hell" (2004), in which the pretensions and the plumbing were equally on display. That film's director, Catherine Breillat, had better luck exposing the backstage machinations of onscreen nookie with 2002's ''Sex Is Comedy," while America's Paul Thomas Anderson did the same for the San Fernando Valley porn industry of the 1970s in ''Boogie Nights" (1997). Even there, Mark Wahlberg received a prosthetic assist.
In this context, Winterbottom's ''9 Songs" is both braver and more naive. Because no self-respecting star would ever commit to fornicating on film -- celebrity depends above all on maintaining illusion, and, besides, the agents would probably want 15 percent -- the director has cast unknowns. This works to his advantage, since Matt (O'Brien) and Lisa (Stilley) have a sweet-faced and rather touching anonymity. These aren't the hard-faced fleshbots of porn videos but a believable couple doing what many kids their age do (or wish they were doing), which is go to a lot of concerts and have a lot of sex. There is tenderness, enthusiasm, laughter, banality, and, yes, there is oral sex, penetration, ejaculation, and (very) light S&M.
Is ''9 Songs" pornography? If your definition of porn is the filming of sex acts, yes. If your definition of porn is the filming of sex acts with no other aim than physical arousal, no, it's not. Is it good art? Sadly, no, since Winterbottom alternates between concert footage of some excellent bands (the Von Bondies, the Dandy Warhols, Franz Ferdinand, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club) and the couple's frolics with a regularity that quickly grows monotonous.
The more pointed questions might be: What does ''9 Songs" gain, if anything, from showing real intercourse in a non-porno context? Would the movie be any better or worse, more insightful or less moving, if it had simulated the sex like other movies? Would it be less honest, and what does ''honesty" mean when actors are playing fictional characters? (At the very least the editorials and this article wouldn't have been written, but only a cynic would accuse the ever-earnest Winterbottom of doing it solely for the attention; he's a provocateur, not a mountebank.)
Why are we so scared of real sex in movies anyway, especially when it's connected to love? Does a society benefit from building a wall between brutally functional carnality and diluted mainstream expressions of same, or is the wall maintained at the expense of considering the infinite gradations between the two? Sex is a universal and driving force in much of our society and culture -- especially popular culture -- and we isolate it at our peril. ''9 Songs" brings it out from the back room and says, look, this is what two people who care for each other do. You may hate the idea of the film, and you certainly don't have to see it if you don't want to, but Michael Winterbottom has exposed a lot more than his actors to the air.
and modesty pouches
