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By Ray Sawhill

May 10, 2000 |  Perhaps one explanation for the current near-absence of what we might call traditional movie eroticism is the preeminence of TV, video and the Web as media forms. TV used to aspire to be like the movies. Now the effort is going in the opposite direction, into making movies more like TV, ads, rock videos and Web sites. There's a big difference between new-media sexiness and movie eroticism.

Video tends to make everything literal and raucous. Tasty bits aren't just brought to the surface, they're made ultrabrite, and actively go after your nerve endings. This is sex as special effects and packaging, all tweaked and Photoshopped. It's sex for kids, the kind of sex you run out of energy for at about the age of 30 -- around the same time, perhaps not coincidentally, many people lose interest in new pop music. (Has anyone yet made a movie that has intriguing sensual qualities using this new pumped-up, one-blast-after-another, nonlinear language? Some would say "Fight Club," others have made a case for "Run Lola Run." I'd argue for "The Matrix." Whatever the case, there haven't been many.)

Part One Movies in heat Films used to erotically seduce us; now they tend to sedate instead. By Ray Sawhill

As it's generally used and encountered, video is either in "sell" mode (snazziness and production values = you're being sold) or "reality" mode (no professionalism = truth), interrupted by the occasional blast of ESPN2-style nutcase edginess: ahh, "excitement!" Your nerves get a jangling, but you may wind up feeling like a figure from one of those out-of-focus, dysfunctional-life-in-the-'burbs literary book jackets: a flattened, wispy creature romping wanly in a backyard somewhere, recalling -- too late! -- the bliss of not growing up.

No wonder younger people sometimes say they feel like oversated, over-focus-grouped consumers before they feel like anything else. During a water-cooler conversation with a lively young co-worker the other day, I made a passing reference to "adult pleasures." "Such as what?" she said challengingly.

If media sexiness tends to be like a Big Gulp, movie eroticism can sometimes be like wine; it can have layers and depth. At its best, it's about seduction and invitation, and it coaxes responses out of you, even if (occasionally) brutally. It's almost embarrassing how basic some of the reasons for this are -- so basic we often forget what they are.

For instance: Movies have beginnings and ends, while the many channels of video just go on and on. Within delimited movie space and time, structured experiences can be created that are comprehensible and discussable -- you don't need to banter with friends to get oriented, or to hold what you're watching at a distance. Languorousness, so important to mood, takes on meaning in movies; in video it seems like an absence of pace. Just as basic is the fact that the movie image is far more detailed and denser than the video image. There's simply more to take in -- and because there is, you're more likely to enter into its world.

The ritual of moviegoing contributes to the qualities we think of as cinematic. You go to a theater at a specific time. You haven't just sat down with the remote. You're in the movie's home, not your own, and when a movie works, you rise up into it. You submit in order to discover, and the experience can be like exploring both the world and your own imagination. You're doing this in the dark, of course, half in private and half among other people: Who needs Plato's Retreat? The limitations movies impose -- the schedules, the frames around the image, the beginnings and endings, everything that stands between them and virtual reality -- can contribute to experiences that may reach you on a deep level even when a movie isn't very good. Exceptions do abound, but video sexiness is generally about effects (and suggests masturbation), while movie eroticism suggests a way of experiencing, and interacting with, all of life. (Is it only me or do other people sometimes feel as though they're surrounded by only two classes of Americans these days: happy masturbators and unhappy masturbators?)

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that sex conceived of as excitement that aims for nothing but to become faster and noisier always lets us down.

Had I been less startled, what I might have said to that young co-worker is that some adults discover a larger world of sensation when they view eroticism not as a restless search for arousal, but as a matter of sinking into the moment, whatever that happens to be, and exploring what's there. Moviegoing can be approached in that spirit, and when it is, it can become an occasion for reverie and poetry, for lust, sadness and discovery -- and for probably much else.

Next page | "Basic Instinct" and "Chasing Amy" both have a blond, lesbianism and lots of dirty talk