The Sex Scene Is Dead. Long Live the Sex Scene

V.C.: Me, neither.

D.S.F.: I have. I was curious, because it recently unseated Adele as a No. 1 album. Of course, it’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, and if there’s anybody who may be a sleeper agent in this post-excitement culture, as Vinson has called it, I think Lin-Manuel might be up there. But it’s not that “Encanto” does not have romantic content, interestingly. There’s a love triangle in the film involving secondary characters. It’s that the main character is not driven by that. And so I guess a child watching it would not, in the way when they watch “Aladdin” or “Cinderella” or “Snow White,” see romance as the ultimate motivation for living.

N.F.: That makes me think about someone like Verhoeven. When you think about “Basic Instinct,” or the kind of classic erotic thriller that Verhoeven was one of the main purveyors of, along with people like Adrian Lyne, in those movies, there were stereotypical, gendered figures. Sharon Stone was Sharon Stone. And, yes, it seems like there isn’t that much of a place for that right now, masculinity and femininity in these archetypal forms that we used to have, when Robert Redford could pay a million dollars for a night with Demi Moore.

A.S.: Doreen, I know you saw “Benedetta,” the latest Verhoeven movie, and I did, too. I wonder if Naomi or Vinson . . .

V.C.: I watched quite a lot of it, and wowee. The sex scenes kept coming one after another. I was, like, these ladies are fucking. It’s interesting, because that movie is about a woman—an Italian nun, in the seventeenth century—who wants all the results of faith and none of the process. Like, she’s moving past prayer to, immediately, “I want the stigmata, I’m seeing Jesus.” She just wants all the spectacle, and I think that is partially expressed, too, in the crazy way that she has sex by, like, fashioning a dildo out of the Virgin Mary.

A.S.: To me, the sex is the absolute worst part of that movie. Sonically, Verhoeven really was going for verité. But the sex felt almost obvious. It didn’t leave anything to the imagination, to the extent that the imagination of the movie itself felt reduced.

D.S.F.: Right. You could draw a parallel to the conversations that took place when “Blue Is the Warmest Color” premièred, almost a decade ago, in a slightly different climate. Those scenes were being extracted and posted on porn sites, which was really interesting, because clearly viewers had the reaction that it was beyond verité—it was, like, actually sex. People have made this argument about “Monster’s Ball,” too, that scene with Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton—that it got so close to the real that it didn’t have an identity as art in any way.

I think, counterintuitively, what you’re saying about “Benedetta” is that the sex could have been dancing, could have been fighting, could have been any other kind of physical contact, because I didn’t feel like that film was actually interested in sex as a channel for human connection.

A.S.: Yes, exactly. It was about Verhoeven saying, “Look, I can go here. I’m not going to shy away from this.” It felt superimposed, like a point was being made rather than it being anything integral to the movie.

N.F.: I know, Alex, that you’ve dipped into “Euphoria.” I mean, I’m moving to TV now . . .

A.S.: Yes, take us there.

N.F.: We were talking about you starting to watch, and I was, like, “It’s kind of awful, but I can’t look away.” It’s very involving, in that it keeps hammering the nail on the head really, really hard. Everything is turned up to eleven. And with the sex—Doreen, have you watched any of the new season yet?

D.S.F.: Yes, I’ve watched all of the seven episodes [of screeners].

N.F.: O.K., me, too, but this could apply to the first season as well. What is the meaning of the sexual congress that is happening? Obviously, it has meaning for the plot. It’s not completely disconnected from where the show is going. But a lot of it is, like, “Look at me, look at what I can do, on TV, in a show that’s supposedly for teen-agers.” You know?

D.S.F.: Yes. I’m not saying that I’m a “Euphoria” defender, but, like you, I can’t look away, and I genuinely think that a lot of the episodes are super interesting, especially in the second season, when one of the characters has a complete social and implied mental breakdown that’s predicated on her having sex with someone that she shouldn’t have.

N.F.: Yes.

D.S.F.: And all the elements of her personality are almost entirely depicted through fucking. I guess my constant gripe is that, so much of the time, that show has been put into this crucible of “Is it too realistic or is it completely unrealistic?” There are people who are saying, “Yes, I did all this stuff in high school,” and people who are saying that they didn’t. And, for me, it’s not whether or not you were, like, fucking on ecstasy in high school. The question is: was that the only thing that you did? Sometimes “Euphoria” makes me want to use a word that I basically never use in daily life, which is “sexist.” It seems, so often, that in its interest in awakening the figure of the provocateur—which I think is totally legit and reasonable, so much of our culture right now is really earnest and de-sexed—the show has just made these women really retrograde figures.

N.F.: Yes. For better or worse, there’s something very seductive about the show. But also, like, read a book, you know? They’re all idiots. I mean, they’re not idiots in terms of their baseline intelligence, but they’re all body and sensation and impulse. And arguably that’s what you need for a teen show, maybe, but it’s also what you need for porn. You watch porn for a reason, and it’s not to watch people talk about books.

V.C.: I think porn does loom large here. Alex asked at the beginning, What do we want from sex scenes? At an earlier time, when there wasn’t widespread access to porn, there were entire movies built around: I want you to be bothered the rest of the day, because this film is so fucking hot. But I do think that the proliferation of porn makes us then have to try to be smarter about sex in shows than we necessarily want to be. It’s almost like when [Stephen] Sondheim died, and everybody was talking about his genius. His songs weren’t just songs, they moved the story forward. I can hear that editorial voice in sex scenes now: What is this sex for? And “to make people horny” is not enough, so you have to try to stylize and sort of auteurize the act.

A.S.: As a new “Euphoria” watcher, I found it interesting to see that in the first episode two people start to have sex—it’s a guy and a girl, they’re not legally adults, and the guy starts to strangle the girl, and she’s unhappy, obviously. And then, in a very cynical, or blasé, voice, Rue, the narrator, says something like, “Don’t worry, this isn’t going to end in a rape. This is just what you’re used to if you grew up with porn,” followed by a mashup of a lot of different porn scenes of violence against women. The show is consciously operating in a world in which that’s the baseline.

D.S.F.: One thing about “Euphoria” is that sex is rarely ever attached to pleasure. It’s hot to think of sex as being a perpetual game of power dynamics being flipped, right? But “Euphoria,” because it’s always operating on that really high-octane level, you never see two people having sex just for the fun of it. There’s a moment in this season where Rue and Hunter Schafer’s character, whose name I’m forgetting.

N.F.: Jules.

D.S.F.: Jules, right. It starts to seem like they’re going to have a healthy—for them—sexual relationship, and then because Rue has this opioid addiction she can’t actually feel the sensation. And I just thought that that was a supreme kind of, like, God-controlling-the-puppets moment from Sam Levinson [the show’s creator], where it was this one moment that feels pure, and the characters are not allowed to experience it.

N.F.: To pan out a little bit more, there is a sense that if cinema or, you know, tentpole cinema has become for children, quote-unquote, then TV has become for adults. Its role is as the bearer of adult values and preoccupations and activities, grounded in increasingly explicit sexual relationships, including stuff that in the past would have never happened, or rarely happened, like male full-frontal, which is now a big thing.

D.S.F.: Every show. Every single show.

V.C.: A lot of dicks up in there.

A.S.: Yes, people are looking for a taboo to break. But cinema, or TV, or any kind of artistic or art-adjacent medium, is not going to be the standard-bearer of sex anymore. It’s already been outstripped by sex on demand. To me, though, there are still two things that a sex scene can do more interestingly than, say, most porn, because of its context in a larger story. It can express surprising desire, which I think is hard to capture, but when captured is quite extraordinary. And it can express complex power dynamics, which is what a lot of sex that I’ve seen onscreen recently has tried to do. “I May Destroy You” is an obvious example from the past year or two.

But I’m wondering, if, in the post-MeToo moment—if we’re even still in that moment—we’ve given up on desire. Has eros gone out of the sex scene? And, if it has, can we find it elsewhere? I find myself almost getting more prudish when it comes to desire—like, oh, is it a glance? Did you just ruffle someone’s sleeve? I love “Blue Is the Warmest Color” precisely because I thought the sex scene showed intense desire in a way that is very rare.

D.S.F.: Yes, the last bit of your comment makes me think—gosh, what was that Céline Sciamma movie that came out three years ago about the lesbian portraitist?

A.S.: Oh, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

D.S.F.: Which is a film that does have a sex scene, but that’s not where the erotic element is located at all. It’s located in the looking, right? The sitter making herself available to the painter. And I remember when that film came out, this was the last film I saw before the pandemic, and every woman was just, like, losing her mind.

N.F.: Just to get to Alex’s question of, what is this for? When I was watching the new season of “Euphoria” with my husband, we were about to start Episode 3 and he was, like, O.K., how many penises are we going to see in this episode?

I said two, and then in the first three minutes there were five penises, something extravagant like that. And I do think there is an obviously titillating element, there’s a shocking element, but there’s also a sense of, almost, humiliation in it. Whether it’s “Euphoria” or “Industry,” or there’s the new “Pam & Tommy” show where there’s, literally, an animatronic penis who talks, because Tommy Lee, you know, has a famously enormous penis. And this is cinema, and it’s a small movie, but in “Red Rocket” there’s an enormous prosthetic penis. In all of those cases, it’s a little bit pathetic, or there is a sense that the revelation of the member is often a little bit disappointing, or a little bit ludicrous, or it’s not necessarily a vector of, like, patriarchal power or pleasure-giving.

A.S.: Well, maybe there’s this idea that you’re literally exposed, and it is vulnerable, and not necessarily in a good way, to be exposed. It’s its own power play. The women have been naked forever, and now the men will be naked, too.

D.S.F.: But crucially only the white men.

N.F.: Oh, interesting, yeah.

D.S.F.: I don’t think in all of the television shows that I’ve watched recently that I’ve seen a Black man nude, and it reminds me of Wesley Morris’s essay, in the Times Magazine, about Black male sexuality. If we are going to position the [full-frontal phenomenon] as progressive, we’re still not at the point where seeing a Black man naked on a television show would be acceptable. Because the culture or, to be more precise, these image-makers, are not yet ready to touch that third rail. That, to me, is something that actually feels like it could be genuinely interesting, dangerous, all those things.

V.C.: Yes. I don’t want to speak categorically, but this topic always makes me think about Philip Roth. I was just reading Joshua Cohen’s book “The Netanyahus,” which is in many ways indebted to Roth. It’s this sort of Rothian exuberance that’s funny and humiliating but also kind of joyful, which I think on TV you now only see with, like, children, which is very strange to me. If there’s anything approaching Roth on TV, to me, it’s “Big Mouth,” where they’re showing children’s dicks, and they’re talking about the shape and size of their dicks. The character Andrew Glouberman—my favorite—glories in his dick even as he talks about how it might be different from other people’s. He likes it, and he is into it. And he’s amazed that someone might feel guilty about jerking off, until the episode where he is introduced to Christianity.

But it’s funny, because I think, rightly, male sexuality is so fraught. Like, would you want to watch a TV show about a just unstoppably horny guy?

N.F.: Remember “Californication”? But that was horrible.

A.S.: Vinson, it’s so interesting you talked about “Big Mouth.” I think all of us are fans, and it almost feels counter to a show like “Euphoria”—just watching the pilot of “Euphoria,” I thought, Is the purpose of this to make me terrified for the youth? Doreen, this goes back to what you’re saying about pleasure, but the word that also comes to me is “joy”—on “Big Mouth,” there’s a lot of joy. Just like in Philip Roth, who’s not a writer necessarily associated with joy, but it’s connected to freedom: that sex is an exciting aspect of freedom rather than an obligation within a group context, which is what at least I was getting from my very brief experience with “Euphoria.”

D.S.F.: I have a question about what we mean when we say we’re terrified for the youth. I don’t know enough teen-agers to really understand how they even process “Euphoria.” But when I think about being a teen-ager watching “Skins,” or watching “Degrassi,” I was able to be taken in by these shows because I saw them purely as fantasies. Because the reality of being a teen-ager was just so fundamentally unglamorous, and these shows were interested in putting that patina on the experience. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like we automatically say that these shows are scary, for some reason.

A.S.: Well, for me, the specific thing where I thought, Are you trying to make me feel afraid for the youth?, had to do with the social element. I don’t think sex and sexuality was ever separate from the collective. There are always elements of pressure, of knowledge, who knows what, who’s talking about whom. But, to me, the sense that there’s no privacy, you’re never offline, you’re never allowed to be tuned out, is where the fear lies. Because I think that’s also the thing that most distinguishes current youth from generations past; just the sense that you can’t opt out at any point, because your social life is going on at all times whether or not you’re around.

V.C.: That technology-plus-sex thing is kind of what makes me think of “Euphoria” more as either a wish or a dream, because it seems, from everything I hear, that the Zoomers are on their phones being social to the exclusion of sex. Like, that they lose their virginities later, that teen pregnancy is down. By all of these indicators, it seems like they are less interested in sex, and “Euphoria” is, like, what if I had this technology with the relative sexual danger of being a child in the eighties or in the nineties? It’s kind of a fantasia, an anachronism of how people once acted and how they might employ the technology of today.

N.F.: We were talking about the metaverse at dinner yesterday, with our daughter, Nina, who is ten years old, and we were saying, everybody is saying that soon enough we will never see each other in person, everything will be simulated, online, etc., etc. And then she said, but what about procreating?

A.S.: To shift gears a bit: I want to ask about sex scenes that you guys have seen recently and liked. I’ll go first, because I kept bringing it up in our e-mails, and I’m now getting creepy about it.

N.F.: Oh, the hairbrush.

A.S.: The hairbrush.

N.F.: Did you watch it?

V.C.: Yes, it was fantastic.

A.S.: We’re talking about “The Hand of God,” the new Paolo Sorrentino movie. The film’s protagonist is a seventeen-year-old boy, Fabietto, whose childhood has been abruptly ended by personal tragedy. And in the film in question he’s given some firm erotic instruction by an older woman who lives upstairs from his family. I love that it’s about discovery—something happening in private that transforms the relationship between two people—but also changes how Fabietto thinks about himself and his own life and experience.

Often, when huge disparities of age are involved, clearly it signals an abuse of power. This scene flips that trope on its head. It’s a kind of loving but firm initiation, on a razor’s edge between terrifying and creepy and helpful and kind. I also thought it was sexy, in its own weird way.

V.C.: I didn’t want to be the first one to say that, but, yes, I thought so, too.

N.F.: I think it’s extremely European, you know, even putting aside the fact that it’s a boy who’s barely legal, or not even legal, and a woman who has a lot more experience, and the potential abuse of power. Like, when have we seen an older to old woman engage in sexual congress, and she’s not, you know, all tucked, like in an American movie? I can’t really recall.

D.S.F.: Yes, I mean, obviously, it’s not a one-to-one parallel, but has anyone been watching “And Just Like That”? It’s not a reboot of “Sex and the City,” because it’s actually a completely different show that happens to have the same characters. It’s not interested in sex at all, I would argue. And there are so many jokes in the show about how women in their mid-fifties are no longer seen in society as sexual beings. That’s one of those truisms that is really taking hold in American culture that, functionally, is completely untrue. There are so many women who are desirable because they’re in their fifties and their sixties. I think that’s something that this country is so far behind in understanding—that a lot of people are attracted to older women. Every time I watch “Call My Agent,” I always think that.

N.F.: Yes, France! But it’s true, what I like, in American TV shows, is when sex is portrayed in ways that are surprisingly not idealized. For me, one of the things that’s annoying about “Euphoria” is that in its haste to show its characters as, like, “I was fucking when I was five, I was snorting oxy when I was in sixth grade,” there’s no sense that sexuality is something that’s weird and embarrassing and changing. I want to see something that deals with real emotions and desires and bodies.

D.S.F.: There is a scene in “Love Life”—I can quickly summarize. William Jackson Harper’s character had been in an unhappy marriage. He and his wife end up breaking up. It’s his fault, and so his life spirals. He’s a book editor in New York—he lives a life that we’re very familiar with. And one night he goes to [the West Village pub] Fiddlesticks, and he’s in despair, and he meets this girl who’s really energetic and who makes him feel powerful and in the right for what he did in his former relationship, and he goes home with her—to an N.Y.U. dorm. I found the scene excruciating, but I thought it was really well done. His character is probably, like, thirty-three, thirty-four years old, and she’s twenty-two, and she’s sort of implicitly acting out what she feels a sex scene should be. She has this over-the-top, loud orgasm in, like, thirty seconds—and the show makes a point, obviously implicit in a lot of sex scenes, of noting the passage of time, that, no, it actually has only been, like, a minute.

And I really appreciated “Love Life” for going there. Sometimes it feels like young women are taught to only think of sex on this black-and-white scale of being great for you, romantic, perfect, or an instance of abuse. The scene didn’t exactly flip the dynamic; obviously, he’s still weird for going home with this girl. But it’s an experience that happens, and so often those more innocuous things are hard for shows to dramatize.

V.C.: After this happens in the middle of the night or early morning, William Jackson Harper’s character gets up and tiptoes out of the room. There’s a narrator in the show, and the narration is something like, “He walked out knowing that he was just one in a stream of things that would happen to her as she grows up.” It was played as that sort of initiation plot, like, it’ll be something that she might not even remember, but it’s part of her emergence into the adult world. And meanwhile he’s still having a crisis.

I was thinking about this when you talked, Doreen, about Black male sex. William Jackson Harper is playing a role in “Love Life” that in the movies we think of as more of a Jewish male role, frankly—like a guy who’s sort of anxious, is really good at talking to women but then doesn’t know what to do and gets wound up about it, but always seems to succeed anyway. Maybe I’m just describing Woody Allen movies. But there is something happening there, like the sort of urbane, interesting guy who’s obviously smart, and they always talk about William Jackson Harper as being secretly buff. There’s this weird thing of an obviously sexually functional personage onscreen being played as the sort of underdog guy. I mean, Mahershala Ali could never play that guy, because everybody would be, like, stop that bullshit, we all know the truth. And so maybe it ends there. But William Jackson Harper, specifically, seems to me a transition in the journey of Black male sexuality onscreen.

D.S.F.: That’s so fascinating. Thinking also about his role in “The Good Place”—I don’t know how many of you watch that, but there are a lot of people, and I was one of them, who took issue with the frankly just absurd pairing of his character, who’s really bookish—I mean, he’s like the caricature of the character that he plays on “Love Life”—ending up with this kind of dirtbag woman played by Kristen Bell. It felt like one of those pairings that came from a think tank: Why don’t we bring together these two cultures that should supposedly never mix? But then, of course, there is no actual spark between the two of them, and so they ended up furthering this idea that, if we have a Black man onscreen in the interracial space, his sexuality has to be tamped down.

N.F.: We haven’t mentioned “Girls.” As many opinions about that show as there are, and as many problems, I think its depiction of sex—as something that can both be sexy and provocative, but also touching what I was referring to as, like, realness—was very important for sex on television.

A.S.: Totally. I think there’s a pre-“Girls” landscape and a post-“Girls” landscape in a lot of ways.

V.C.: Yes, for me the Adam Driver character was one of the great points of suspense in the first season of that show. I feel like one of the first episodes has a very bad sex scene between him and Lena Dunham’s character, it seems fraught, but you wonder, how are these people feeling? I just want to talk to Adam, like, hey, do you like that? I’m pro-“Girls,” always have been. And maybe this is what Doreen was talking about: What does it mean to refine sex beyond the act, to make it expressive of art? There are ways in which the sex in “Girls” was descriptive of character that I always thought was interesting.

D.S.F.: Yes, and why is it that arguably the next HBO show that is an obsession of the media class in New York, “Succession,” is very adamantly not portraying sex. It’s ludicrous. In Season 3, Logan’s decline (he has a decline in every season) is predicated on him having sex with his employee, but we never see that, right? All we get to see is, like, the urological disease.

A.S.: Well, I actually think that sex is a big part of “Succession,” just because it’s a conscious lack. The humiliation is so tied to sex, to emasculation. Shiv is the dominant one in her relationship with Tom, and everyone mocks Tom. Whereas Tom actually wants to have sex with Shiv and Shiv doesn’t want to have sex with him. It is so uncomfortable on “Succession” when Tom tries to initiate anything loving or tender or sexy with his wife, because she’s repulsed by that.

Interestingly, to me the show is getting at something about sex, which is its sincerity, because the characters on “Succession” can only ever allow themselves to say something that can be interpreted as its opposite. When anyone says something possibly tender, possibly emotional, it has to be framed in such a way that it could just be a joke and you’re an idiot for believing it. Look at Roman. He wants something from Gerri, or wants some actual connection, but it has to come in a cruel, gross, and destructive way, of, for instance, sending her a dick pic at a board meeting. He can claim that it’s funny, that he doesn’t really care, because if you care you lose. That’s the function of sex on that show. And I find it really interesting, actually.

N.F.: Yes. Sex is a potential conduit to revealing weakness, and so it’s better not to have sex. Or, if you’re having sex, then it had better not be loving or earnest or even enjoyable. Like in the last season, where Tom says to Shiv, “Well, that was some spicy pillow talk last night,” after she essentially told him she hated him. It’s interesting, though, that sex is never depicted on the show, because, obviously, sex also offers a lot of room for humiliation.

A.S.: I’m glad it’s not, because I think a piece of that world is how unappealing it is, how barren. Even that Tom-and-Shiv sex scene is such a good example of, to me, the greatest quality of “Succession,” which is its endless irony. When Tom is asking for sincerity, Shiv proposes doing role-play. And what he gets is sincerity from Shiv in the form of role-play. She tells him the truth, but by saying it’s fake. The idea is that she can do that under the guise of an assumed sexual persona, which is actually just her real persona. It’s amazing.

V.C.: It reminds me of the scene in, I believe it’s the second season, where Roman is trying to have sex with his girlfriend, and he’s, like, can you just be dead. I guess part of it is everybody is trying to wear their dad’s suit, so everybody is kind of role-playing all the time, and, like, nobody can get to the thing.

And, I mean, the person that we are most interested in, Kendall—it’s like he doesn’t come at all. I mean, he’s divorced. He has the girlfriend, a member of the Pierce family, but all he gets is his shit-stained sheets. So, there’s just no eroticism. I count the Roman-and-Gerri thing—that, to me, her talking to him on the other side of the door is the sex scene of the show, like, that is sex and, like, there is some eros there. But for Kendall, all of his drama is elsewhere.

D.S.F.: I don’t know, I’m still frustrated with the lack of a true sex scene. Every season, Logan has a girlfriend or he’s involved in some sort of affair, and the show seems to implicitly argue that the fact that he’s the only one with a functioning healthy libido is why he’s the only person who’s fit to run the company. So I think that at some point the irony has to break and I think we are owed that scene.

N.F.: Let’s get Jesse Armstrong on the horn.

V.C.: Yes.

D.S.F.: Maybe he’ll read this.