Living the Romantic Comedy

What Women Want

It's not for nothing that, according to charts on boxofficemojo.com, the second most popular (i.e. biggest moneymaking) romantic comedy of all time is called What Women Want, a movie which suggests that the answer may be: Mel Gibson.  (Another possible answer to this age-old query, most famously voiced by Freud, may be found within the title of the number one box office-successful rom-com: My Big Fat Greek Wedding -- but I'm kidding, of course...  Right?)

Figuring out what the female of the species is after, really, has been a challenge for men, and a human preoccupation for all of us since the Stone Age (somewhere in the cave paintings of Lascaux, I'll wager, there's a portrait of a red-faced Cro-Magnon guy holding his freshly-beaten head in confusion as an angry Cro-Magnon woman shows him the cave-door).  And it's certainly been a focus of the romantic comedy genre since the silent era.  This is why, as a sort of public service, Living RomCom would like to virtually turn over its post-space this week to another writer and his subject.

What Do Women Want? Discovering What Ignites Female Desire is a fascinating article from the NY Times by Daniel Bergner about the work of a number of women researching this subject: psychology professor Meredith Chivers, sexologist Lisa Diamond, and professor of psychology Marta Meana, along with some eminent male counterparts.

It should surprise no one, I suppose, that Bergner finds more additional questions than answers in this field, or, more aptly, these woods:

“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.”

I'm not going to attempt to summarize this lengthy, in-depth report, beyond noting the inevitable contradictions that surface between ostensible experts, who not only occasionally disagree about fundamental approaches and findings, but at times knowingly contradict themselves.  After all, this is extremely complicated stuff:

“The horrible reality of psychological research,” Chivers said, “is that you can’t pull apart the cultural from the biological.”

The biological and the chemical roots of feminine desire get a thorough investigation, although...

Among [Lisa Diamond's] answers, based partly on her own research and on her analysis of animal mating and women’s sexuality, is that female desire may be dictated — even more than popular perception would have it — by intimacy, by emotional connection.

And yet...

The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating intimacy leads to better sex is, Marta Meana told me, often misguided. “Really,” she said, “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic” — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.

In terms of relevance to screenwriters, I found this particular paragraph of Meana's intriguing:

Yet while Meana minimized the role of relationships in stoking desire, she didn’t dispense with the sexual relevance, for women, of being cared for and protected. “What women want is a real dilemma,” she said. Earlier, she showed me, as a joke, a photograph of two control panels, one representing the workings of male desire, the second, female, the first with only a simple on-off switch, the second with countless knobs. “Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring. If I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of power and that he is a good man.”

At last -- a theory for why there were all those up-against-the-wall sex scenes in the '80s and '90s!  Though it doesn't explain Denzel's dearth of romance/rom-com projects...

But this is only a fraction of the fertile food for thought Bergner's article presents.  I'd suggest that anyone interested in sexuality, gender, and That Whole Mind-Body Thing give this piece a careful read. 

After all, if there's one thing women want -- I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here -- it's for us to give them their due attention.

When Sex Isn't Sexy

There's something a little strange going on in "It's not TV, it's HBO"-land these days.  While HBO looks in vain for a new Sopranos, over at "It's not HBO, it's AMC," Mad Men, the wholly-addictive show helmed by Sopranos alumni Matt Weiner, has become the most watchable series of the season.  Meanwhile HBO's new series Tell Me You Love Me has become what amounts to a cultural oddity: it's watchable in that dubious, "can't tear your eyes away from the car wreck" way, but you can't say -- in spite of all the explicit sex for which the series is already infamous-- that it's remotely sexy.

This is evidently supposed to be the point. The show, writer/producer Cynthia Mort's baby for better or worse, purports to be a study of modern marriage, and as Mort sees it, marriage and sexiness are antithetical.  We're privy to the (extremely) intimate details of the conjugal lives of three disparate couples, as well as the married life of these couples' therapist, played by the admirably ever-game Jane Alexander (who'da thunk she'd have to take off her clothes to get a part when she was well into the, um, mature end of her illustrious career?).  But we're not allowed to have our prurient interests piqued.

According to Mort -- alert the media -- marriage isn't easy.  Specifically, marriage is difficult when -- well past the bloom of courtship and the flurry of sexual activity that generally precedes a more decorous trot down the wedding aisle -- people have to settle into the serious business of living together, perhaps raising children, and somehow finding ways to keep their love alive.  If Tolstoy famously noted that each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way, each contemporary marriage, in Mort's view, is unhappy in its bedroom.

Let us count the ways.  One 40-something couple, played by Ally Walker and Tim DeKay, haven't had sex in over a year.  Another in their 30s, (Sonya Walger and Adam Scott) only have (rigorously scheduled, emotionally conflicted) sex in an attempt to have a baby.  The third -- 20-somethings engaged to be married (played by Michelle Borth and Luke Farrell Kirby) -- have passionate, down'n'dirty sex all the time, but the future of their union is in question because fiance Luke doubts that he'll be able to stay faithful to his future wife.  So their sex, albeit steamy, is suffused with anger, fear, sadness and desperation.  And even the sex between elderly Jane A. and her husband is fraught, because she's recently started seeing an old flame.

Are you turned on yet? 

Seriously: is there such a thing as good sex -- i.e. erotic and angst-free sex -- in Tell Me's universe?  Not in the three episodes I've seen, and I wouldn't bank on it showing up anytime soon.  And this is the thing I find perverse about the conception of the show.  It was instantly controversial due to its graphic and explicit portrayal of sexual intimacy; even the oldsters bare skin, and there's too much of everyone's genitalia glimpsed here and there to qualify as soft-core.  But the sex has been written, directed, shot and edited to be "realistic" -- i.e. willfully unromanticized and un-erotic -- so The Act is purposefully portrayed as being the opposite of pleasurable.

What a weird-ass approach to such subject matter: it's as if Mort and Co. are saying, "It's okay that we're pushing the envelope re: nudity and sex on TV, because Lord knows we're not out to arouse anybody, and hey, nobody who's nude and having sex here is having a good time!"  As an excuse for questionable behavior -- or a rationale for not providing an audience with genuine fun -- it's a bit like someone telling you they've cheated on their lover, but it doesn't matter because they didn't enjoy it.

Within a recent NY Times article (It Isn't a Real Sex Scene? I Still Need a Cigarette) that focuses on the difficulties experienced by actors when they're forced to enact such line-crossing acts, Ms. Mort had this to say about her intentions:

“The goal is to make it moving and emotional and intimate and, yes, uncomfortable at times, because not everyone is comfortable with sex,” she said. “You’re trying to capture that.”

Right.  We get it.  I'm being hoisted on my own petard here, because I've  always said (in my rom-com book and on this site) that the best kind of on-screen intimacy comes from having real characters involved, from not having characterization -- or the plot -- disappear as soon as the camera goes into the bedroom.  And the plus side of Tell Me lies in its willingness to take a courageous, unblinking look at all the little details of Marriage As We Know It, beyond its marital bed discomforts.  While each episode seems to ricochet from the truly interesting to the thuddingly banal, you want to give Tell Me its props for being more honest about what really does go on between consenting adults in a long-term relationship than what you generally see on both small screen and big. 

Still, I can't help being irked by what feels like the doggedly puritanical ethical bottom line here: apparently America still can't handle hot.  We can only show you the sexy stuff, the show is saying, if it isn't sexy.  In terms of pleasure, Tell Me You Love Me takes away before it even begins to give; though it comes on all "ooooh-are-we-naughty!" all the naughty bits come pre-spanked (and not in the good-nasty sense).  It's hard-R-rated with no rrrrrr -- it's sexual spinach.

But is it good for us?  Not necessarily.  Watching Tell Me, I find myself yearning for either the delicious guilt of European art-smut (e.g. Last Tango, The Lover, etc.) or the ticklish frisson of sublimated sexiness in a good old-fashioned screwball (e.g. Carole Lombard in just about anything, but especially Twentieth Century's pajamas)  -- you know, the kind of movies where sex, however illicit or off-screen, is... fun. 

Since when is there an error in "erotic?"  Are we still so un-evolved (in the US) that we're not ready to contemplate -- nay, enjoy -- the spectacle of edgy sex that's angst-free and pleasurably titillating?  Say it ain't so, Living Rom-Commers.  'Cause (call me kinky, call me crazy) I for one would like to think that married life can still be, well -- romantic.

 

All Sex Issue

...And now that I've got your attention: do you think the New York Times has lost its mind?  Every few days now, the front page appears to have a case of Alzheimer's, spewing out random non-sequitorial "news stories" that read more like Onion parodies of same, in which some already universally acknowledged piece of information is treated with "alert the media!" importance.  Like this recent article, The Whys of Mating: 237 Reasons, a report on a report whose real headline could have been: Men Will Say Anything to Have Sex, Study Finds.

After asking nearly 2,000 people why they'd had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons -- everything from ''I wanted to feel closer to God'' to ''I was drunk.'' They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.

This is news, I suppose, but the central findings of this University of Texas at Austin team stop somewhat short of earth-shattering.

The best news is that both men and women ranked the same reason most often: ''I was attracted to the person.''  The rest of the top 10 for each gender were also almost all the same, including ''I wanted to express my love for the person,'' ''I was sexually aroused and wanted the release'' and ''It's fun.''

No matter what the reason, men were more likely to cite it than women, with a couple of notable exceptions. Women were more likely to say they had sex because, ''I wanted to express my love for the person'' and ''I realized I was in love.'' This jibes with conventional wisdom about women emphasizing the emotional aspects of sex, although it might also reflect the female respondents' reluctance to admit to less lofty motives.

I do like the way they broke down the 237 into four categories of reasons (Physical, Goal Attainment, Emotional, and Insecurity).  But the absurdity of the enterprise -- I'm looking forward to the Times headline: Sex Found to Be Pleasurable, Mostly, Report Says -- made me want to forget the whole thing and go to a movie.  Like maybe a movie that made Nerve's posted list of The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema.

Call me kinky, call me crazy, consider me your average human: the voyeur in me has an unabiding interest in erotic (as opposed to pornographic) cinematic moments, perhaps because such moments are all too hard to come by.  A subjective list, of course, and subject to fun debate, but it's also a great basis for your next round of Netflix or Vidiots renting.  I was happy to see some personal faves here (anyone notice any key omissions?) and to note a few that I've yet to check out. 

Though why wait?  If like me, you're a typically 2000s immediate gratificationist and need a quick fix, you can quickly click on from the Nerve List to this mash-up video, Put Your Hands Up For Detroit by Fedde Le Grand, a deliciously dirty serving of classic retro bump'n'grind (and fashion -- dig that crazy cat suit!).

Y' know, folks, there's only so much romance I can take.  Sometimes you just want to get down with your bad self.