Those familiar with the history of filmmaking in the United States understand that the system is no stranger to censorship and oppression. During Hollywood’s golden age, the Hays Code held dominion over all that could be exhibited. Prohibited content included kissing for more than ten seconds, showing infidelity in a positive light, showing criminals winning without receiving some sort of comeuppance for their misdeeds, and portraying same-sex relations in any capacity whatsoever.
Then and Now
Because of its restrictiveness, the Hays Code fostered innovation and new forms of subversion. Some of the most revered films of the period famously used codes to convey their more perverse implications. For example, a shot of a smoldering cigarette in an ashtray symbolized the presence of sexual relations between characters while wearing a handkerchief coded male characters as homosexual.
Today, filmmakers are arguably much less restricted regarding what they can show on screen. Despite the freedoms afforded by the modern media landscape, mainstream US cinema has seen a precipitous drop in sex scenes. This tendency is rampant throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which only recently introduced its first sex scene in the Chloe Zhao- directed Eternals. Naturally, many astute observers took note.
Looking at the numbers, it seems that this mode of censorship has become internalized and widespread. In an article published by Playboy, writer Kate Hagen confirms as much. Hagen utilized statistics found on IMDb to show that mainstream cinema features fewer sex scenes than at any point in the last 50 years. This is especially telling considering that substantially more films (four times more, in fact) were released in the 2010s than in the 1990s.
What are we to make of this information? Is Hollywood really becoming more conservative? This degree of self-censorship could be part of a more significant historical trend.
Panopticism and Self-Censorship
Plan of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison by Blue Ākāśha, 2 September 2019
Michel Foucault famously predicted this rise in self-policing. Citing Bentham’s panopticon, Foucault was concerned with how modes of surveillance and punishment are increasingly becoming internalized, such that the impoverished classes are encouraged to police themselves to their own detriment.
Foucault’s famous example is a case of someone being drawn and quartered before a live audience. Today, this form of punishment is no longer acceptable, yet the state is just as brutal, if not more so. Instead, punishment manifests away from cameras and in more mundane, bureaucratic ways: someone might be placed in solitary confinement, another might receive a speeding ticket. In each instance, the punishment itself is not a spectacle in the traditional sense.
In Foucault’s view, we are at a historical juncture where societal punishment is increasingly evacuated of spectacle and takes place away from prying eyes, so much so that individuals police themselves and others in public and private spaces.
Considering modern cinema against the grain of Foucauldian panopticism, one is pressed to ponder the implications of a return to the puritanical. Audiences can have all the violence and vitriol they want, but showing characters having sex is somehow more taboo. And all this is at a moment when US social divisions are at an impasse, and domestic terrorism is rising.
A Modern Blowback
The sexlessness of modern cinema has not gone unnoticed. Filmmakers like Paul Verhoeven and David Cronenberg (neither of whom are American) have already lodged salvos against the current state of affairs. Verhoeven, who has a knack for courting controversy and is a problematic figure in his own right, gave a recent interview in support of his salacious Benedetta. During the interview, he disparaged Marvel and the latest Bond film for their absence of sex and accused Hollywood of instigating a march towards a new puritanism.
Benedetta, Verhoeven’s latest, could be read as a treatise on the profane. It involves a woman who rises through the ranks of a convent while undergoing a profound sexual awakening that puts her and her lover in danger. Although set in the 17th Century, the film is clearly concerned with the present moment and mobilizes its artifice as such.
On the other hand, Cronenberg’s newest film, Crimes of the Future, seems committed to situating itself somewhere between Videodrome and Crash, the latter being one of the most salacious films of the ‘90s (which is really saying something). With its mantra of “surgery is the new sex,” Crimes seems intent on assaulting the clinical zeitgeist of modern cinema.
While the sexlessness of modern cinema is a localizable phenomenon, films like Benedetta, Crimes of the Future, Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, and Julia Ducournau’s Titane are greeting this moment with the tenacity it deserves.
