LOS ANGELES — A recent TikTok meme that tricks users into recording reaction videos while watching the first few minutes of the arthouse film “Love,” now streaming on Netflix, has renewed a debate over the platform's unclear policy regarding sexually explicit content.
The meme is part of a subgenre of “reaction” videos, where people are challenged to record themselves or friends being exposed to something they are unfamiliar with, often with shocking results.
Some TikTok users recently zeroed in on the opening sequence of French-Argentinian cult director Gaspar Noé’s 2015 erotic dramedy “Love,” which has been quietly available on the platform for several years.
Noé’s film, originally shot and shown in 3-D, retells the breakdown of the marriage of a self-important young artist — a caricature of Noé during his own youth — after a series of sexual entanglements.
Noé filmed all the sex scenes between the actors explicitly, making the “mainstream actors having actual sex in 3-D” the core of the film's marketing.
Newsweek reports that "Love" has now “shot to [sixth place] in the overall U.S. Netflix charts and fourth in the movie rankings, despite having been on the streaming service for over four years.”
“The main reason for this seems to be twofold,” the report conjectured. “The first reason why this obscure arthouse movie is doing so well is that it is one of the recommendations that come up when Netflix users search for ‘365 Dni,’ the Polish erotic thriller that has made headlines across the globe due to its graphic sex scenes.”
The second explanation is the TikTok challenge concerning the opening scene “which sees a character masturbate her male lover to the point of ejaculation, with the camera capturing everything from above.”
Enter Generation TikTok
Confusingly enough, Netflix first added a 2-D version of Noé’s film in 2016, at the same time it premiered the Judd Apatow-produced “hipsters in L.A.’s Echo Park” comedy “Love.”
Both productions named “Love” were occasionally mixed up by streamers, who expressed shock at the explicit scenes in Noé’s film, including the initial long shot of a sexual encounter between the protagonist and one of his lovers that opens the film, and that has now been “rediscovered” by TikTokkers.
According to Newsweek, “this week, users of social media platform TikTok have been setting each other a challenge where they have to watch this opening scene and film their reaction. For example, one reaction video to this masturbation scene sees a woman say: ‘That's a real penis. How is that allowed on Netflix!’ and ‘How is this a movie?!’”
TikTokkers quickly took to Twitter to re-post the reaction videos, with comments such as “Why the fuck did I listen to TikTok and check out the opening scene of 'Love' on Netflix," "Tiktok kept talking about the opening scene of this movie called 'Love' and it wasn’t on my Netflix and I went and looked for it online and... it was literally porn, like the first two [minutes] were literally just porn,” and “I want to know who [the fuck] approved 'Love' to be on Netflix! Shit is a whole-ass porno!”
The new meme shines a light on Netflix’s unclear double-standards regarding sexual expression.
A movie like the explicit version of Bree Mills’ “Teenage Lesbian” — which has a legitimate coming-of-age plot, an award-winning performance by Kristen Scott and a supporting cast and professional production values — would not be allowed onto the mainstream streaming platform because of its “porn” origins.
But the equally explicit, and arguably less accomplished, “Love” has been part of Netflix’s ecosystem for over four years, waiting quietly for its “success by scandal,” thanks to its association with a controversial, watercooler-trendy Polish riff on “50 Shades of Grey” — and to Generation TikTok's passion for short, phone-shot content like reaction videos.