The lion’s share of attention has been directed at John Cameron Mitchell’s “Shortbus,” which features nonprofessional actors engaging in real sex and masturbating, including a scene in which three gay men have a threeway while singing “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Hardcore sex scenes are nothing new on the indie film circuit. Four entries in last year’s Sundance Film Festival had explicit sex scenes, including Michael Winterbottom’s “9 Songs,” a series of explicit vignettes that included close-up shots of vaginal penetration and oral sex.
The question is whether the trend toward real sex will grow beyond small movies and eventually make its way into mainstream Hollywood. More specifically, do these movies pose a threat to the adult entertainment industry?
Not likely, according to entertainment writer Mike Collett-White, who points out that film festival audiences are less prone to shock and disgust than mainstream moviegoers in middle America.
Box office receipts seem to bear out Collett-White’s argument. In 1979, then-Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione tested the market for Hollywood hardcore with the release of “Caligula.” Despite and all-star cast and big budget, the movie flopped.
More recently, actor-writer-director Vincent Gallo attempted to combine sex and “serious filmmaking” with the 2003 release of “The Brown Bunny,” in which actress Chloe Sevigny performs fellatio on Gallo. While newspapers and magazines wrote extensively about the potential impact of the movie, theater owners in the U.S. were unwilling to take a chance on it. The movie has done better in terms of DVD rentals, but not enough so to prompt studios to jump headlong into porn.
Some have accused indie filmmakers of using sex as a way to stand out from the herd, but the indie filmmakers who are using hardcore sex in their movies contend that explicit content does not make their movies pornographic.
In fact, Mitchell and others, such as Larry Clark, director of “Destricted,” a series of explicit sex-centered vignettes, maintain that the sexual content in their movies is intended to reverse negative perceptions about sex that have resulted, in part, from easy access to Internet porn.
“There are kids who have seen pornography from a very early age, before they are ever going to have sex,” Clark says. “Young people are looking at pornography, and they are thinking that this is the way to have sex.”
Anders Morgenthaler, director of the sexually explicit animated feature “Princess,” is downright hostile toward pornography.
“I decided to make a film about porn’s influence in society because I saw porn seeking its way into everything, into clothes or toys,” he says. “There is a ‘porn way’ of selling things because it sells very well. I got very angry at the role of porn.”
