Bella Baxter, the absurd, Frankenstein-esque creation brought to life by Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Poor Things, really wants sex. She first discovers pleasure by herself, rapturously, before essentially fucking her way across Europe. The experience turns her world into luscious technicolor and sharpens her sense of agency and injustice. Mostly, she just enjoys it, frequently and in many positions, Stone fearlessly goes for every note of carnal ecstasy. She is, as Vulture’s Rachel Handler put it, one of the most shamelessly sexual characters committed to screen.
A blank slate able to experience her own desire completely devoid of social conditioning or judgment, Bella would be confused by the mixed reaction to the film’s sexual fantasia. Some, such as Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién, have dismissed it as a deceptively shallow male fantasy of sexual exhibitionism, uninterested in the real sex lives of women. Others, myself included, see Poor Things as a celebration of desire – carnal, intellectual, convivial – and of the extraordinary teamwork between Lanthimos, as director; Stone, as actor and executive producer; and intimacy coordinator Elle McAlpine, who helped choreograph each of the many nude scenes.
It is fascinating to witness, given the rarity in recent of years, of sex on screen and the recurring discourse over its merits; at times, Poor Things feels like a glorious rebuke to the cyclical “unnecessary sex scenes” Twitter thread. It’s one of many films this year that, remarkably, have depicted sex as sex – something provocative, hot, yearning, outrageous, sad, dirty or fun, not divorced from morality but not dominated by it, either. From raunch comedies to devastating intimacy to the voyeuristic tale of abuse aftermath that is Todd Haynes’s May December, it has been a good year for sex on screen, if not always a successful one (I’d like to never think about the dirty talk on HBO’s The Idol ever again). Even director Christopher Nolan had Cillian Murphy’s nuclear scientist fuck in his blockbuster Oppenheimer, his first film to feature either nudity or sex. I watched Poor Things delightfully agog, so fresh and rare did its unabashed, frictionless approach to sexuality feel. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” said Lanthimos at a Venice film festival Q&A when asked why that felt so surprising. “Why is there no sex in movies?”
That’s an exaggeration grounded in truth – sex on screen has been fraught for years. Last year, the New Yorker convened a critics roundtable on the death of the cinematic sex scene (if not so much the television one). There’s been a real, literal decline in cinematic sex scenes in the past decade. According a 2019 report in Playboy using IMDb data, sex in cinema in the 2010s was at its lowest point (1.21%) since the 1960s, half a point (1.79% ) lower than in the 1990s, the heyday of the erotic thriller – significant in relative terms, as four times as many movies were released in the 2010s as the 1990s. And a number of factors – the #MeToo movement and public reckoning with legacies of abuse, the reported decline in the number of Americans having sex, the radicalizing effect of social media – have led to a pushback against the sex scene as unnecessary or, at worst, inherently exploitative. A survey released by UCLA in October found that over half of gen Z want to see more platonic, not romantic, storylines, and that nearly half felt sex was not needed for the plot in most TV shows and movies.
That’s of a piece with the wave of adult dramas released in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein investigation that took a moralistic approach to sex and a burrowing focus on abuse. These so-called “#MeToo films” – among them, Bombshell (2019), The Tale (2018), Promising Young Woman (2020), The Assistant (2019), Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) and the literal Weinstein investigation in She Said (2022) – had vastly different takes, to vastly different degrees of success, on the psychology of trauma, the extent of culpability and the pursuit of justice. But all, on some level, carried on a voguish sense that sex and systemic injustice were deeply intertwined.
Things are messier in May December, one of a number of films this year that meditate on desire – its power to destroy, delude or destabilize, its ability to unlock something new. Haynes’s film is an icy, fraught exploration of how we narrativize it. The title plays on the cultural moniker used to sanitize Gracie’s (Julianne Moore) relationship with her husband Joe (Charles Melton) – she seduced him when she was 36 and he was 12, and they became a tabloid fixation. The stories they need to believe to keep going – for Gracie, that he seduced her; for Joe, that he wanted it – are disrupted by the arrival of an actor, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), playing Gracie in a movie. Sex, in May December, was once a crime and a public fixation; in private, for all three, it’s an expression of self-delusion and purposefully queasy.
Not so in All of Us Strangers, written and directed by Andrew Haigh, and Ira Sachs’s Passages, which treat sex as an aesthetically beautiful, sensory connection in an otherwise messy, cold world. In All of Us Strangers, the chemistry between depressed writer Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal) incites a surreal rapprochement with Adam’s long-dead parents (and also some of the year’s most titillating screen grabs – for a deeply sad movie, the sex is very hot). “I really wanted to feel the subjective nature of having sex,” Haigh told Vanity Fair. “And what it feels like – the nervousness and the excitement and the physical sensation of being touched by someone else, and what that does to you.” Passages is a more straightforward, yet equally sensual, queer love triangle – Tomas (Franz Rogowski) leaves his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) for a straight woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos) – that mutates in lush, charged, explicit sex scenes.
Desire is dangerous, too, in a pair of films that riff on the classic erotic thriller – Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman, and Chloe Domont’s Fair Play. Fennell’s film about a middle-class striver who lasciviously fixates on an upper-class family, seducing each one by one over a sweaty summer, contains some of the most divisively profane, arguably bait-y scenes of the year. Fair Play, meanwhile, uses the sex (or lack thereof) between Luke and Emily, two illicit lovers at a cutthroat hedge fund, to make a point about corrosive male insecurity. Both films, as Alexandra Kleeman argued in the New York Times Magazine, misunderstand the provocations of erotic thrillers (Saltburn, at least, relies too much on self-satisfied provocation for provocations’ sake), but are both instructive (and fun) in their failures.
This year also experienced the revival of another genre: the R-rated theatrical sex comedy. In Adele Lim’s Joy Ride, a group of Asian-American women travel to China for an unapologetically horny, ribald tour, complete with a vigorous sex montage, that recalls the heights of Bridesmaids, Girls Trip or The Hangover. In Emma Seligman’s Bottoms, two uncool lesbians (Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott) start a fight club at their high school in a convoluted plan to get laid. And Jennifer Lawrence also has a backwards sex plan – sleep with a pasty, virginal teen before he goes to college in exchange for a used Buick – in No Hard Feelings.
That’s not to mention television, which has long been more of an erogenous zone than film, and had its own hits and misses this year, among them: the delights in Shonda Rhimes’s Queen Charlotte; the graphic, glossy, prolific gay sex in Showtime’s Fellow Travelers; the bizarre, revealing marital sex scene between Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder in the equally bizarre series The Curse; and the extremely unsexy misfire that was The Idol.
That show was perhaps the most instructive, in that it egregiously mistook the pornographic for the erotic, making fuel for the “unnecessary sex scenes” argument. But on the whole, even the failures of sex on screen this year – the boring, the predictable, the uncharged, the automatic or smug – felt like a step in the right direction. Let Bella Baxter’s legendary horniness be a guide – there’s a world of strange, titillating, fascinating human behavior to explore more on screen.
