(U-WIRE) -You know what the media needs? Sex. This may seem a strange thing to advocate, given the proliferation of prudish protests and FCC lawsuits. But then again, what they're protesting isn't really sex at all. It's vulgarity, and it's nudity, but it's not sex. What our movies, TV and music try to pass off as hot, hot action is, in reality, generic, plastic and deadening. Think of network and cable TV. Even on the more permissive MTV, even after 1 a.m., all of the naughty bits and talk are blurred out, and we're left with the same spray-on sweat, posed positions and blank looks we get at 3 p.m. on NBC daytime. Even in R-rated films, we get the pre-requisite soft focus and clenched hands and choreographed moans.
Each medium has forgotten that sex, when not directly involving you, is pretty boring. There are limits -as there should be -to exactly how graphic mainstream media can be, but when those limits are coupled with a lack of imagination, the result is the same mediocre encounters produced over and over, with the directors always straining to push the limits of content instead of style.
Sex has been reduced to formula both in form and function. In themselves, sex scenes and sexual lyrics or videos are routine renditions of the same barely acceptable phrases, shots and 1.5 entendres. In the context of the story in which it appears, the sex scene
has begun to be nothing more than an item on a check list. It's something the hero and heroine have to do after the big chase, pratfall or guitar solo. It's a pause in the story, not an advancement of it.
In real life, people have elbows and shoelaces and socks and weird birth marks. In the heat of the moment, any of these will lead to embarrassment, awkwardness, laughter, revelation or all of the above. On the screen, no one has to bend over to take off their shoes and no one gets their arms tangled in their shirt. Instead, everything is dutifully scripted and perfectly executed.
But more troubling is that sameness. Songs, films and shows are all built on character and the well-timed revelation of it. So why are sex scenes interchangeable? For some reason, actors, directors and writers seem to forget that sex scenes, like every other scene, are about distinct people with specific histories and feelings. So instead of Character A (homicide detective, mid-30s, history of sexual abuse) and Character B (P.R. specialist, devoted child, workaholic) expressing themselves through physical action, all we get are interchangeble bodies one and two.
Enrique Iglesias can writhe all he likes, and he still won't be one-tenth as affecting as John Lee Hooker rumbling through the first lines of Boom Boom Boom. For all of Britney Spears' moaning and antics with snakes, she'll never touch Janis Joplin, and Paul Wilson's pouting is nothing to Bill Murray's graying, rueful smile. Because competence is sexy, and in the end, that exposed flesh is only so much skin.
And we've all got plenty of that. 17
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