MoviesAlexander Linklater's article about how it felt to watch his girlfriend giving Mark Rylance a blow job could not have been better timed. The disappointments of this season's Big Brother have left those broadsheet readers that have a taste for prurience desperate for something new to discuss. Linklater's long and thoughtful piece about his response to his partner's involvement in some of the most explicit sex scenes seen in mainstream cinema more than fulfils this remit. The Indecent Proposal-style dilemma at its heart has given everyone the chance to speculate ad infinitum about their own sexual boundaries.
Interesting as this topic clearly is, it has rather overshadowed what should have been a more substantial debate. The real issue about Intimacy's unprecedented portrayal of "real" sex has nothing to do with the way the actors felt about doing it. Far more important is the issue of what the director was thinking of and whether his decision to push the envelope was well founded.
For Linklater, the question of whether the scenes were "artistically justified" in the context of the film itself is irrelevant. What matters is the broader artistic aim of bringing cinema closer to the truth about human relations. "Not showing something runs counter to the instincts of cinema," says Linklater; he believes that nothing should be protected from the camera's probing gaze. If things are out of bounds, he says, then film is failing in its duty to be a "voyeuristic eye" that magnifies and heightens our own "fleeting" and "confused" experiences.
It's fairly persuasive stuff, but I would dispute the contention that a scene involving a real erection is necessarily more honest than one that simply hints at its presence. In fact, I would go further and say that it is harder to make a truthful piece of film about sex when you're bent on showing everything than it is when you maintain a proper distance. This is because the fact of a sexual act is always going to overwhelm its context. However noble the director's intentions, the physiological impact of seeing a real penis takes the audience out of his narrative and makes them as immune as a dirty-mac man at a peep show would be to any attempt to show them the meaning of what's taking place. As the French philosopher Baudrillard said in respect of Catherine Millet's erotic memoirs, obscenity is a "wall" that "cannot be crossed".
The truth of this maxim has been more than borne out by the media response to what publicists are insisting is a ground-breaking piece of cinema. "So did she, or didn't she?" wondered the Sunday Times at the top of a piece about Linklater's partner, Kerry Fox. The answer was pretty easy to establish, so, in a desperate effort to avoid discussing the actual movie, the interviewer asked her whether her co-star "really" had an orgasm.
Well, who can blame her? Why should she resist this line of inquiry when her readers would clearly wish her to pursue it? No one is going to see Intimacy because they're interested in the story of what a man does when he is released from the constraints of family life. To a man and woman, they'll be queuing for a look at Mark Rylance's penis. Respectable people they may be, but at this moment they are no different from the flickering-eyed consumer of pornography who fast-forwards through the scene-setting to get to the money shot.
No doubt Linklater would argue that this is only happening because nothing like it has ever been seen before. If he did, he'd be wrong. The reclamation of sex by pornography is something that will always happen. Far from freeing up the director to look into the "gritty and dark" realities of the subject, the graphic depiction of sexual acts will block any attempts he makes to artistically chart this terrain.
The more he shows, the less he can hope to say. This equation - more than the convention - has informed most directors' reluctance to reveal all; the chances of achieving a high level of emotional reality are higher when they place more faith in the viewer's imagination.
Linklater's claim, that audiences cannot be convinced that sexual relations are taking place unless they actually see it, is wrong-headed and bizarre. His suggestion that the implausibility of a film such as Boogie Nights was entirely due to the fact that it didn't show actual sex removes responsibility from the director. Boogie Nights was not believable because the director who made it had a glamorised view of the pornography industry. He would have done this whether or not Marky Mark was shown having actual sex because the idea of attractive people taking cocaine and shagging is always going to be more seductive than any pseudo moral message. The same problem will, I'm sure, hit the depiction of real sex in the movies.
Although, at the moment, the practice is sanctioned only for boring, earnest films such as The Idiots or Romance - both protected themselves against the charge of peddling pornography by making sure that the sex they showed was dismal and depressing - how long will it be before jollier directors decide that it's time to give happy, sexy sex a look-in? If the current trajectory isn't arrested, within a few years the po-faced pursuit of "real" - as in non-sexy - sex will be confined to just a few directors while the rest of them get on with the more lucrative and infinitely more enjoyable business of making multi-million dollar shag-fests. And then where will we be?
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