What with Ang Lee's sexually explicit Lust, Caution winning this year's top prize at the Venice film festival and the cautionary sexual tale Atonement doing rather well in the cinema, questions of eros are in the air. Lee's previous film, Brokeback Mountain, was praised for its discretion with cowboy-on-cowboy action (though rumours persisted that a more explicit version of the sex scene in the tent was shot), yet here he is, one of cinema's masters of the visual equivalent of the mot juste, deciding that uncoy sex scenes would not disrupt the aesthetic decorum of his period film. Meanwhile, Atonement's scriptwriter Christopher Hampton and director Joe Wright insisted that Ian McEwan's use of the word "cunt" was exactly what was needed to disrupt the decorum of their film, which ended up with a 15 certificate.
Rather than rehash those lads' mag and television lists of best sex scenes in the movies (Betty Blue, Don't Look Now, Body Heat, Out of Sight and My Beautiful Laundrette usually figure), or reopen the debate about censorship, let's imagine for a moment what cinema would be like without sex, if the erotic had not been central to its gaze and sales pitch.
From the earliest days, American epics directed by Cecil B DeMille were strewn with babes lolling in the buff. Such scenes, and the early French porn films recently released as the compilation The Good Old Naughty Days (which featured equal opportunity combinations of nuns, priests and dogs), show that, right from the start, movie-makers had one foot in the sex business. If movie depictions of sexual activity or longing had not been allowed, then Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Weissmuller, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Russell, Kim Novak, Sharon Stone and Brad Pitt, for example, would not be household names. Stars like Mae West, who wrote as well as performed, might well have made it, and Marlon Brando, who got his leg up because he looked gorgeous in a ripped T-shirt, would probably have changed the acting world nonetheless. The real losses would have been the likes of Monroe—a brilliant, erratic comedienne.
More striking, perhaps, is the converse. Many would argue that the 1960s in Europe and the 1970s in America were among the greatest periods in movie history, but look at some of the headline talents from those eras: Martin Scorsese, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Wim Wenders. More than a hundred films between them, yet relatively few sex scenes. Scorsese in particular seems to avoid them. And if we open out further to those who many consider the greatest directors of all time—Orson Welles, Yasujiro Ozu, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, FW Murnau—there's relatively little sex in their hundred-plus films either. Of course, this last bunch mostly worked at a time when censorship forbade overt eroticism, but there's no doubt that Welles was more interested in power than sex, Ozu in family equilibrium, Dreyer and Bresson in spirituality, and so on.
Eviscerate the movie world of its sexuality, then, and you get some surprising results. On the downside, we would lose key figures like Monroe, Novak and Bardot. And it seems obvious that by ignoring the force field of eros, and its disruptive power, we'd be left with a bland, Eisenhowerian worldview. But this is one bit of the hypothesis that we don't have to imagine, because since 1982 Iran has banned depictions of sexual activity or longing and the result has been a generation of films about learning, community, friendship, poetry, co-operation and spirituality, which sounds deadly dull but in fact has produced some of the glories of modern cinema. One of the most famous film theory essays helps explain why. Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) argues that movies adopt, as it were, the male gaze, and that such gendering warps film form and film culture. If Mulvey was right, and many believe she was, then the richness of Iranian filmmaking seems to derive from the lack of a structuring, sexual gaze at its core.
So are we on to something here? If many of the greatest filmmakers of all time disavowed sexual activity, and if one country's forced avoidance of it has resulted in great art, then here's a proposal: a voluntary vow of cinematic chastity. Perhaps, for two years, we could submit ourselves to a sexual detox? Doing so might rid Bollywood of its wet sari coyness and French and American cinema of their sexism. A temporary cinematic celibacy would surely mean that actresses of all ages would be cast interestingly. It would force our writers and directors to explore more diverse aspects of human nature. It would take some of the heat out of cinema but, perhaps, replace it with light.
