sex

Bull Durham (1988)

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As we’re nearing the midpoint of 2025, I’m making peace with the fact that my favorite new release so far this year is a movie about baseball. The laidback, casually philosophic baseball comedy Eephus finds tremendous thematic & spiritual significance in a sport that I’ve never really had much interest in before but now understand to be a rich cinematic subject. I was charmed by the team-camaraderie story told in A League of Their Own (both the 90s movie and the too-quickly cancelled TV show).  I had an unexpectedly emotional experience with the 90s baseball melodrama Field of Dreams as well, finding it to be a surprisingly affecting story about marriage, faith, and fatherhood – all filtered through the rhythms & spiritualism of baseball. My entire life, I’ve considered baseball to be about as boring of a spectator sport as watching someone assemble a jigsaw puzzle. I get that it’s an interesting strategic game for the players, but visually there’s just not much spectacle to it; it’s like watching competitive chess with the added excitement of … waiting around. All of that empty time spent loitering on the field and over-thinking game theory in the dugout does leave plenty of space for the transcendent poetry of cinema to flourish, though, and so I’m starting to appreciate the appeal of baseball movies these days even while still missing out on the appeal of baseball itself. As a result, it seemed like the perfect time to catch up with another classic example of the genre, the minor-league sex comedy Bull Durham.

Written & directed by former minor-league player Ron Shelton, Bull Durham attempts to provide behind-the-scenes insight to the general baseball-watching public of what it’s like to play for the minors. There are seemingly two career paths for competitive minor-league players, both defined by their relationship with The Major League (referred to in-film simply as “The Show”). Tim Robins is a young player on the upswing: a talented but undisciplined fuckboy who could earn his way into The Majors if he focused on honing his skills instead of bragging about what he’s already achieved. Kevin Costner is his older, wiser counterbalance: a dependable, level-headed player who’s aged out of his physical ability to compete in The Majors but is hopelessly addicted to the ritual of the game. Costner is hired to get Robins’s wildcard hotshot pitcher into shape as his more mature, grounded catcher, entering the scene with a verbatim “I’m too old for this shit” complaint of jaded exhaustion. Their old-timers vs. new blood conflict is quickly supercharged by the intrusion of Robins’s other unofficial sidelines coach: a fellow “too old for this shit” team groupie who sleeps with one promising player every season so she can help mold him into something great. Naturally, Susan Sarandon steals the heart of both men in that part, and the question of whether this will be her final season hangs just as heavily over her head as it does for Costner.

I might not ever fully understand the spiritual power of baseball, but I feel like I’ve intrinsically understood the full sexual dynamism of Susan Sarandon my entire life, so this is likely the most effective gateway to appreciating the sport as I’ll ever find. Sarandon is nuclear hot here, flavoring the cougar seductress role she later filled in White Palace with a thick Southern drawl, recalling Dolly Parton’s sweetly sexy narration track in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Her pursuit to reshape Robins’s wild horndog energy into something more purposeful & measured takes on a distinct BDSM power dynamic as soon as their first night together. He wants to tear his clothes off and immediately jump into bed, but she makes him slowly strip to really feel his body, then ties him to the bed and reads him classic poetry as foreplay. Later, she convinces him to wear black-lace lingerie under his uniform to help distract from the internal self-doubt monologue that throws off his pitches. When he first meets her, “he fucks like he pitches, all over the place,” but by the time they part she’s almost literally whipped him into shape. Meanwhile, her sexual dynamic with Costner is much more sincere & equitable. When Costner ties her to the same bed, it’s to paint her toenails as a visual substitute for cunnilingus. He’s mature enough to take things slow, all romantic-like, which is an energy Sarandon struggles to adjust to after “coaching” so many jumpy, undisciplined fuckboys over the years.

Bull Durham wastes no time to addressing the spiritual, transcendent aspects of baseball. In her opening narration, Sarandon explains that she has chosen to dedicate her spiritual life to the sport as a direct substitute for religion, musing about how the 108 beads in the Catholic rosary directly correspond to the 108 stitches in a regulation baseball. She’s not the only old-timer in the picture who pontificates about how The Church of Baseball is “the only thing that truly feeds the soul,” either. Whenever Costner gets misty-eyed bragging about his brief time playing in The Majors, he gets lost in the thought that “The ballparks are like cathedrals.” All of the game theory, philosophy, ritual, and superstition that goes into keeping even a mediocre minor-league team on its feet for a season gets away from everyone involved, and the genius of the film is in how it’s connected to Sarandon’s own complex theorizing on the transcendent poetry of casual sex. For his part, Ron Shelton brings all of this spiritual abstraction down to a tangible, real-world level once Costner & Sarandon make peace with their impending retirement. At the climax, Sarandon explains in narration, “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a job.” Balancing that working-class practicality with the spiritually fulfilling poetry of the sport is something I’ve seen wrestled with in all of the various baseball movies I’ve been watching lately, so I suppose there’s an undeniable truth to the observation.

-Brandon Ledet

Closely Watched Trains (1966)

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At the time of posting, the social media platform TikTok is back online after briefly being banned in the United States over some vague Red Scare surveillance paranoia involving the app’s ownership by a Chinese company. Despite having called for this ban during his first presidency, Trump has found an executive-order workaround for the Supreme Court’s decision against TikTok’s fate in the US, retroactively pinning the unpopular decision to the recently concluded Biden administration. The brief banning of the app inspired US TikTok users to flock to an alternative platform to alleviate their #content addiction (including the Chinese-owned app RedNote, which spiked in American usership), and it also had me reflecting on what TikTok has contributed to Online Film Discourse. Like with all platforms, there are both good & bad data points that color TikTok’s character, from the shameless shilling for corporate media that the app’s Influencer class indulge for red carpet access to the stray surges of interest one out-of-nowhere video could draw to obscure works like Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe. Overall, though, when I think of what “MovieTok” (which I would happily rename “FlikTok” if I had the power) brings to Film Discourse, my mind goes to the trend of slagging art films as purposefully inscrutable puzzles that cinephiles only pretend to appreciate in order to appear smart. Anytime a celebrity lists a European art film during their “Letterboxd Top 4” interviews on the platform, a TikToker mocks their supposed pretention in a parodic video listing fictional titles.  Instead of expressing curiosity in any film outside the bounds of the MCU (or their more recent Major Studio equivalents), they make up a “4-hour black and white film about the Serbian government through the eyes of a pigeon.” It’s a stubbornly ignorant way to approach unfamiliarity with art, and I personally hope it dies with the app.

For any younger audiences doubtful that black & white European art films can be accessible & entertaining, I’d recommend checking out the 1966 Czech New Wave classic Closely Watched Trains, which was accessible enough to American audiences in its initial release that it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Closely Watched Trains is a shockingly light entertainment for a black & white Czechoslovakian art film about making sure the trains run on time under Nazi occupation. Its historical circumstances and its final scene are tragic, but structurally it’s a 90-minute boner comedy packed with prurient goofball schtick. While the MovieTok commentariat would have you to expect a Czech New Wave art film about Nazis to be a non-stop misery parade, Closely Watch Trains mostly plays out like one of those coming-of-age comedies about a teen’s sexual misadventures while working their first summer job … except it’s set at the edge of a frosty, war-torn Prague. There’s even a little “Welcome to my life” narration track at the start, as if you’re watching the original foreign-language version of Ferris Bueller instead of a project that was passed over by Věra Chytilová for seeming too difficult to adapt from page to screen. Sure, its final beat is deadly serious about the violent circumstances of Nazi rule, but its scene-to-scene concerns are refreshingly honest about what a teen working their first job outside the house would be paying most attention to: getting laid. It’s a shame that the MovieTok platform isn’t used to introduce younger viewers to a wilder world of cinema through accessible gateway films like this and instead tends to dismiss the entire concept of European Art Films outright for an easy punchline. Or, more likely, the more dismissive responses are the ones that reach a wider audience thanks to the algorithm’s bottomless love for Rage Bait, which is exactly how it works on my own evil #content app of choice, Twitter.

As a coming-of-age story, Closely Watched Trains keeps things simple. A scrawny sweetheart named Miloš attempts to follow in his father & grandfather’s footsteps by apprenticing as a railroad dispatcher. The circumstances of the job might have become a little more strained now that the trains are under Nazi command, but he’s told that if he sticks it out long enough he’ll get to retire with a pension. At the start of the job, he’s offered a crossroads of three different priorities: work, politics, or women. Unsure of which direction he wants his life to go, he tries his hand at each – flirting with rigid professionalism, flirting with a plot to bomb a Nazi supply train, and flirting with a cute train conductor who’s his age and eager to become his girlfriend. His physical urges overpower his higher mind for most of the runtime, leading to a series of proto-Porky’s sexual escapades that include train car orgies, ink-stamped butt cheeks, and a lot of vulnerable discussion of premature ejaculation. As silly as some of these sexual encounters can be in the moment, Miloš has Big Teenage Feelings about them that occasionally raise the stakes of the story into more traditional War Drama territory, sometimes under Nazi threat, sometimes under threat of self-harm. It would be reductive to present the film purely as a comedy, given its political & historical context, but for the majority of its runtime it’s more adorable than grim. Even its more overt indulgences in the art of the moving image are less challenging that they are cute. Wide-shot frames arrange the actors & trains with dollhouse meticulousness, which combined with the dark irony of the sex & romance recalls the work of Wes Anderson – maybe art cinema’s most widely accessible auteur.

I do not have much at stake in the ultimate fate of TikTok, but I do have something to say to the art-phobic influencers of MovieTok. There is no reason to be intimidated by the Great Works of European Cinema just because they’re initially unfamiliar. No matter how artsy, The Movies are ultimately just as much of a populist medium as TikTok #content; you can handle it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Telephone Book (1971)

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I don’t know that most people decide what podcasts to listen to based on which are most “useful” to them, but I still want to report that Justin LaLiberty’s guest episodes on Brian Saur’s Just the Discs Podcast are the most useful the medium has ever been to me.  Shortly before every Vinegar Syndrome flash sale, Saur will interview LaLiberty (longtime Letterboxd champion and current Director of Operations for VS partner label OCN Distribution) about what titles Blu-ray collectors should scoop up while prices are low.  These conversations are always overflowing with great recommendations for high-style, low-profile genre films I would have never heard of otherwise, and it’s the kind of podcast I listen to with a notepad on hand.  To that point, one title LaLiberty has repeatedly promoted on these Just the Discs eps is the 1971 sexploitation comedy The Telephone Book, to the point where purchasing it felt mandatory (especially since its softcore lewdness pretty much guarantees it’ll never land on a major streaming service).  In general, Vinegar Syndrome has been particularly proud of this discovery & release, using it as a touchstone representative of the distro’s brand: vintage schlock & porno that has more cultural & artistic value than its reputation would suggest.  Having now finally seen it, I totally get it.  It’s a masterpiece of messy, sweaty, independent filmmaking – the exact kind of forgotten curio movie nerds are always hoping to rescue out of the bargain bin.

The Telephone Book is a freewheeling, semi-pornographic arthouse comedy about the divine art of dirty phone calls.  It’s grimy, street-level New York City filmmaking at its most playfully absurd.  Sarah Kennedy stars as an impossibly bubbly 18-year-old nymphomaniac who wastes away horny afternoons sweating alone in her NYC apartment.  Her bedroom boredom routine is violently disrupted at the start of the film by an anonymous dirty phone call from a man in a nearby photobooth, who announces himself under the alias John Smith.  Shocked that the call is the most satisfying sexual experience of her young life, she’s determined to track down the mysterious John Smith in the phone book listings, which guides her through a series of decreasingly satisfying sexual escapades around the city.  The film quickly devolves into a sketch comedy format from there, with isolated performances from 1970s theatre powerhouses William Hickey & Jill Clayburgh standing out among the more generic perverts of NYC.  Then, the momentum of the search for the phonebooth John Smith comes to an abrupt stop when he physically shows up at the scene of the crime, entering our nympho heroine’s apartment disguised in a pig mask.  Most of the rest of the runtime is comprised of his explanation of how he got so good at making dirty phone calls, playing out like the killer’s confession at the end of a slasher.  Then, he repeats the act that drove his victim insanely horny in the first place, melting down what remains of reality with the filthy sound of his voice.

The climactic dirty phone call is so ecstatically perfect that it cannot be convincingly depicted onscreen.  Instead, scenes of the second phonebooth call are intercut with the pornographic images bouncing around in Kennedy’s head, illustrated as crude bathroom-graffiti sex cartoons and explosive warzone audio.  The entire movie plays like a filthy collage in this way, right down to the graphic decor of our heroine’s bedroom, which looks like if the cut-and-paste wallpaper of Daisies was made entirely of porno mags (matching the general vibe of watching Věra Chytilová adapt articles out of Screw magazine).  War photography stock footage illustrates John Smith’s confession of power & guilt as his demented madman ravings get lost in the weeds of fascist American militarism and simulated space madness.  Cutaway interviews asking men why they make dirty phone calls to strangers recall the candid street interviews of Funeral Parade of Roses in their frequent plot disruption.  I’ve seen a few American titles that share DNA with The Telephone Book‘s oversexed, anarchic satire (and I really mean just a few – particularly Bone, Putney Swope, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), but it’s all played with a tone & visual style that would feel much more at home in an artsy European film fest environment.  I don’t know that anyone’s out there dying to see Al Goldstein’s cheesecake sexuality filtered through the collagey French New Wave sensibilities of Agnès Varda, but if you’re out there, there is exactly one movie that might hit the spot.

As a vintage sexploitation time capsule, The Telephone Book is most illustrative in how it turns phonebooths and phone books into fetish objects of its era, splashing them with the cold water of a dial-a-prayer 900 number service for counterbalance.  Sarah Kennedy’s performance as a Sexy Baby archetype with a girlish voice & body but a monstrously voracious sexual appetite is also a marker of its time.  At one point, she watches then participates in the filming of an orgy as if she were a child observing then entering a petting zoo, fascinated by but detached from the action.  It’s difficult to say whether that characteristic was intended as pure macho fantasy or a pointed satire thereof, but it is undercut by the inclusion of Clayburgh’s more mature, jaded performance as her sultry bestie.  Clayburgh exists only in phone calls with Kennedy, never bothering to take off her sleeping mask while receiving head or loading her revolver in bed, only removing it once the phone sex with John Smith heats her up to an unbearable degree.  John Smith himself (a masked Norman Rose) is where the political satire of the picture creeps in and dismantles the entire illusion of the cutesy nudie cutie it could’ve been without him.  His confession and repeated phone call in the back half are so brilliantly staged that they make you want to immediately start the movie over again to reexamine sillier elements you might have dismissed as smut & fluff in the opening stretch.  That’s partly what makes it such an ideal movie to own on disc, the same way its psychedelic porno breakdown makes it an ideal Vinegar Syndrome disc in particular.

-Brandon Ledet

Heavy Petting (1989)

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If you’re going to make a formulaic talking-heads documentary about a broad cultural topic, you might as well interview David Byrne: an actual Talking Head with a distinct cultural point of view.  There’s not much to the late-80s cultural commentary doc Heavy Petting that you can’t find in most current reality-TV confessionals, in which random, fame-desperate weirdos shamelessly divulge TMI insights into their personal lives in exchange for extended screentime.  The only difference, really, is that Heavy Petting interviews vintage hipster celebrities instead of contemporary nobodies, which gives it a sharp edge over its modern competition.  David Byrne is included among the likes of Laurie Anderson, Ann Magnuson, Sandra Bernhard, Alan Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman, and William S. Burroughs as the talking heads interviewed – a real who’s who of art-school-weirdo idols who haunted the streets of 1980s New York City.  They’re all individually sat in front of a black-void Sears & Roebuck photoshoot backdrop and asked to recount their earliest childhood memories of and experiences with sex.  For the most part, they’re surprisingly open to the interrogation, give or take a visibly irritated Burroughs, who acts as if he’s impatiently waiting for a delayed bus ride home.  There might be decades of reality TV confessionals exposing the raw sexual psyches of everyday extroverts, but there’s only one place you can go to find David Byrne talk about the mechanics of open vs. closed-mouth kissing as if he were a middle school space alien who just crash-landed his UFO into the schoolyard, eager to smooch his first earthling.

One-and-done director Obie Benz juxtaposes these personal confessionals about childhood sexual discovery with vintage propaganda reels promoting sanitized, Leave It To Beaver era sexual “health”, as well as clips of the 1950s sex icons that subverted the morals of the era.  All of the interviewees were raised in an era when Elvis & Mansfield’s wiggle, Dean & Brando’s biker leather, and Monroe’s husky whisper commodified the horned-up rebellion of rock ‘n roll for teenage consumption (during the birth & definition of The Teenager as a concept), but they were not prepared for the physical mechanics & consequences of sex through any formal education.  Rock ‘n roll got them riled up, but the unscientific gender-performance propaganda of the era left them completely clueless about the basic facts of sex: the physiology of pregnancy, the existence of sperm, the existence of the female orgasm, etc.  It’s easy to dismiss the film’s subversive use of 1950s instructional reels as an aesthetic cliche, especially after decades of these same vintage, Father Knows Best-style images being mocked on ironic postcards & bumper stickers.  However, the personal vulnerability of the interviews and the low-key insidiousness of the stock footage prove to be shockingly affecting as the widespread failure of American sex “education” curdles the ironic laughter into political fury.  The initial novelty of hearing Abbie Hoffman reminisce about a totally-hetero circle jerk he had with his childhood schoolmates gradually gave way to my own resentful memories of being raised sex-ignorant as a small-town Catholic in the exact era this film was produced, leaving little room for nostalgic kitsch since the problem never went away.

I was initially annoyed by Benz’s choice to avoid labeling his interviewees in identifying chyrons.  You either know who Ann Magnuson is or you don’t; even the final montage jokingly credits her as a “TV spokesmodel”, not the fringe actress & Bongwater poet I know her as.  When that montage reveals that a couple reality-TV level nobodies (i.e., NYC businessmen) are mixed among the more recognizable talking heads, I came around on the decision.  The movie intends to diagnose a widespread cultural rot in the rift between America’s leather-jacket horniness and America’s prudish aversion to sex education, so it’s smart to demonstrate that it’s a psychological damage that affects everyone, not just artsy-fartsy perverts.  This closing-credits reveal also pairs the subjects with their actual high school photos, confronting the audience with the faces of children who were deliberately left unprepared for healthy sexual lives in the name of Family Values.  All of the marketing for Heavy Petting promises benign Gen-X irony and repurposed 1950s kitsch, but there’s something bravely vulnerable & culturally heinous about what it unearths in its interviews and its moldy stock footage.  I found it strangely powerful and unfairly undervalued.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beast (1975)

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I’ve watched a few disparate adaptations & reinterpretations of Beauty and the Beast in recent years, each with their own unique window into the dark magic of the fairy tale: the intensely sensual surrealism of the French version from 1946, the tactile storybook atmospherics of the Czech version from 1979, the Internet Age psychedelia of the animated Japanese version from 2021.  All of these retellings of the “tale as old as time” have, of course, touched on the hesitant attraction of an innocent young woman to a wounded, mysterious brute, but they also all ultimately focus more on the brute’s troubled past & cursed homelife than the inner life of the vulnerable beauty who loves him.  That’s where Walerian Borowczyk’s take on Beauty and the Beast finds new, forbidden territory worthy to explore (as a French adaptation from a Polish director, as long as we’re tracking geography).  A profane masterpiece of erotic menace & goofball social satire, Borowczyk’s perversion of the Beauty of the Beast template delves deeper into the monstrous extremes of women’s desire & pleasure than any other retelling I can name, to the point where the titular beast is merely a prop, a piece of furniture.  And wait until you see what the women do to the furniture!  The Beast is also singular its smutty eagerness to roll around in its own filth, an instinct that eventually pushes past the absurd into the sublime.  It’s the only version of this story I’ve seen that reasonably compares to the 1940s Cocteau film that defines so many adaptations’ basic visual language, mostly because both works were clearly made for abject perverts.

Technically, The Beast is not an adaptation of the 18th century fairy tale at all, at least not in terms of plot.  Like the recent anime version in Belle, Borowczyk’s film assumes the audience’s overfamiliarity with the source material, using its basic iconography for shorthand to push & warp its broader themes to new extremes.  This is still a story where a young, naive woman is married off to a cursed, wretched beast as a desperate financial ploy, with the deep sadness of their newly shared castle’s faded glory haunting their tentative romance.  And just in case you don’t catch his allusions to the fairy tale, Borowczyk hands the beast’s would-be bride a single red rose as a symbol of their delicate union.  It’s just that this is the kind of film where the young beauty mashes that rose into her clitoris as an unconventional masturbation tool, destroying it in lustful mania while entertaining a zoological ravishment fantasy that would make even the most jaded cinephile blush.  You’d think there’s nothing left that a Beauty and the Beast tale could do to surprise an audience, considering how many times it’s been retold & reshaped over the past few centuries.  The Beast dropped my jaw in shock in its very first frame, which zooms in on the textbook veterinary details of equine genital arousal.  The movie opens with relentless, repetitive images of erect horse cocks, fairly warning the audience that if you stick around long enough you will watch beasts fuck in intense biological detail.  You won’t find that kind of novelty in either of Disney’s retellings of the tale, but Borowczyk’s version has a way of distilling it down to its most essential, throbbing parts.

The beastly beau in this picture is the poorly socialized nephew of a decrepit French baron, living in a Grey Gardens style faded estate in the rot of long-lost wealth.  Hoping that a traditional Christian marriage will bring the mysteriously disgraced family back into the royal fold, they arrange for the ancient nobleman’s brother, a highly reputable Cardinal, to ordain his weirdo nephew’s union with a spritely British heiress.  Only, the heir to the estate is a hopeless loser, spending every waking moment in the stables overseeing an intensive horse-breeding program with a fervor that pushes beyond the practical to the disturbed.  Luckily, his wife-to-be is just as much of a shameless pervert, immediately matching the unholy, decadent vibe of the chateau with her own morbid sexual curiosity.  Since her beau is too socially obtuse to understand or reciprocate her enthusiasm, he leaves her sexually frustrated in the absurdly long wait for the Cardinal’s arrival, dead time that she fills with wet dreams of the estate’s sordid history.  There are superstitious rumors that a former lady of the house had mated with a cryptid beast who cyclically haunts the grounds every couple centuries, which is supposedly how the family was excommunicated from the Church in the first place.  The beauty sweatily reimagines this human-bestial coupling in extensive, graphic detail while furiously masturbating in her bridal nightgown until the poor cloth is ripped to shreds.  The horny, mythical beast of the past and the shy, grotesque beast of the present are eventually linked in a last-minute twist, but their connection is far less important than the perverted pleasures of the women who desire their touch (and thrusts).

Before The Beast devolves into full-on cryptid erotica, its value as a unique work gets lost among its many literary parallels, which extend far beyond the fairy tale it most overtly alludes to.  The long, pointless wait for the Cardinal’s arrival at the castle plays out as an existential joke, recalling surrealist works like The Exterminating Angel & Waiting for Godot.  There are also overt Buñuel parallels in its blasphemous mockery of the wealthy & religious ruling class as degenerate brutes, pushing its satire to de Sadist extremes but never fully matching the heightened Buñuelian humor at hand.  The centerpiece of the work really is the pornographic depictions of bestial fucking, then – starting with the horses, working up to more traditional onscreen heterosexual couplings, and then climaxing with the historical ravishment fantasy that swallows up most of the third act.  “Climax” is the only word you could really use to describe that payoff, too, since the humanoid wolverine who couples with an actual human being spurts semen by the bucketload for minutes on end as their tryst pushes beyond taste & reason.  A faux-classy harpsichord soundtrack keeps the mood lightly comical throughout this absurd display, and it concludes with a punchline in which the Cardinal, finally arrived, performs a grand, fingerwagging speech about the evils of bestiality & women’s libidos as if he were reading from a pre-prepared pamphlet.  In the end, it’s the women’s arousal & search for pleasure that registers as the film’s most blasphemous acts, even more so than its extensive depictions of their monstrous ravishment fantasies.  They’re greatly enjoying themselves, much to everyone else’s disgust & confusion, which remains a global movie censorship taboo to this day.

Borowczyk finds his own fairy tale visual language here with images that have no obvious connection to the Beauty and the Beast tale: a snail sliming its way across a lady’s sky-blue shoe; lurid flashes of red paint through hallway doors that slyly recall aroused genitals: pornographic close-ups on actual aroused genitals; etc.  As soon as his equivalent of Belle arrives on the estate taking dozens of dirty Polaroids of every perverted detail she can collect, it’s clear that he’s taking the story to new, distinct places.  Most Belles cower in fear of the erotic menace lurking in their new home castles, gradually warming up to the beast who stalks the grounds.  In this version, she’s so immediately fired up by the ugly erotic charge of the central pairing that it freaks out everyone around her, including the audience.  A half-century later, it remains a bold, hilarious, intensely alienating take on a story that’s continued to be told countless times since, but rarely with such gleeful prurience. 

-Brandon Ledet

Graphic Sex at the Multiplex

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And so, with all of the festival buzz surrounding Yorgos Lanthimos’s upcoming vulgar Frankenstein riff Poor Things, we have lived to suffer yet another round of online Sex Scenes Discourse.  It’s only been a month since the young Evangelicals of the American suburbs were traumatized by brief flashes of Florence Pugh’s breasts in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer the last round, and now we’re hearing from international YA fiction nerds who claim that “Most actors and many viewers don’t particularly like or miss [sex scenes in movies].  Only film critics and some directors seem to want them.”  Like everyone else who’s addicted to online outrage bait, I always find myself scrolling through the replies to these Sex Scene diatribes in stunned disbelief of the support they receive, convincing myself that Zoomer prudes are itching to bring back The Hays Code.  Also like everyone else who’s addicted to this monthly ritual, I’d be a lot better off just putting down my phone and watching a dirty movie instead.  It’s worth reminding ourselves that these anti-sex scene freaks don’t speak for an entire generation of moviegoers; they’re isolated cases of puritanical mania, most of whom get their steady stream of chaste content through Disney+ and romance paperbacks written for teens, only to be scandalized by intimate moments of nudity & bodily contact the one or two times a year they accidentally watch a movie for adults.  For the rest of us—audiences who believe sex is a common aspect of human life worth interpreting onscreen—there are still a few cinematic holdouts that haven’t given up the culture war to The Prudes, despite constant online chatter decrying their existence.  The very best way to combat Sex Scene Discourse is to log off and go see a dirty movie in public, the filthier the better, which is exactly what I did the week Poor Things kicked off another round of puriteen grumbling online.  Actually, I saw two.

Because America is a nation founded by Puritans, my best bet finding graphic depictions of sex at my local multiplex is catching up with the few adult dramas that happen to land domestic distribution at international film festivals.  Memphis-born American director Ira Sachs seems to understand this conundrum, which is likely how he ended up making his messy bisexual love triangle drama Passages in France instead of the US.  Here, Passages was threatened with an “NC-17” rating for its frank, onscreen depictions of queer sex, the modern equivalent of an “X.”  In Europe, it’s a standard-issue adult drama, acted out by a small cast of Euro film fest regulars familiar to mildly risqué dramas just like it: Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adèle Exarchopoulos.  Rogowski stars as a temperamental, narcissistic German filmmaker living in Paris with his much stabler, milder-mannered English husband (Whishaw).  At the end of a typically tense film shoot (of a fictional movie also titled Passages), Rogowski feels the communal attention to his control-freak antics & directorial authority plummeting, so he acts out by sleeping with a French woman on the film’s crew (Exarchopoulos), seemingly on a first-time bisexual whim.  Addicted to the thrill of stirring up drama in his marriage and in the romantic life of his new sexual partner, the film follows his desperate, darkly hilarious stunts for attention as he plays his two lovers against each other for his own momentary amusement, until he pushes both relationships past their breaking point, leaving him inevitably, permanently alone.  It’s basically Poly Under Duress: The Movie, as anyone who makes the mistake of finding Rogowski attractive is sucked (literally and figuratively) into his hedonistic little orbit.  There’s nothing especially deep or revelatory about Passages as a character study of a horned-up narcissist, but it is always encouraging to see that someone is still out there making complicated dramas about messy adult relationships, and Sachs goes the extra mile by centering this particular story on The Messiest Bitch in Paris.

Sachs also dared to directly engage with the Sex Scene Discourse in his response to the MPAA’s decision to slap this would-be R-rated drama with a higher, penalizing NC-17 rating – yet another data point in the organization’s long history of homophobia (see also: their egregious R-rating for M Knight Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin earlier this year).  The main sticking point with most sex scene haters is that they’re “unnecessary” because they “do not advance the plot.”  Personally, I think anyone who’s watching movies for The Plot above all else are already lost causes and would be better off reading an airport novel than engaging with cinema as an artform, but I appreciate the way Sachs pushes back on this notion anyway.  In Passages, all advances in plot & characterization are achieved through sex scenes.  We learn more about these characters in their private moments of intimacy than we do in their more guarded public lives, and there’s something especially pointed about the way Rogowski’s character deliberately creates drama in the bedroom to make his weekly schedule more interesting now that he doesn’t have a film project to work on.  In explaining his refusal to edit Passages to meet the MPAA’s criteria for an R-rating, Sachs stated, “It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives.  And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie.  To make an interesting sex scene is not easy.  Each of the sex scenes to me is a chapter in the film.  It has a story.  And I wanted each one to have its own relevance and have its own details and be interesting to the audience.  I think making interesting sex scenes is the hardest thing . . . What I tried to track here was not to look at sex, but to look at intimacy, not constructed through editing and avoidance.”  That sounds like an artist who’s committed to the cause, and we’re lucky to have him fighting on the frontlines of the online Sex Scene Wars.

All that said, I don’t know that treating sex as a normal, natural human behavior onscreen is enough anymore.  It might be time to escalate the weaponry of war and make our dirty movies even dirtier, officially adopting a scorched Earth policy.  That’s why it’s always important to go see a John Waters repertory screening whenever it’s offered to you, and I’m fairly sure The Prytania’s recent screening of 1977’s Desperate Living was the first time a Waters film has played here since NOMA’s retrospective of his work in 2017.  It’s been even longer since I watched Desperate Living in particular with a crowd, and it was projected off the same ancient DVD scan of the film both times, well over a decade apart, because there’s no better version available – a damn dirty shame.  Partly a hand-constructed dystopia about a community of crust-punk murderess outcasts and partly a storybook fairytale about a lesbian uprising that topples an unjust monarchy, Desperate Living is my personal favorite John Waters film and, thus, my favorite work of art.  About halfway through this most recent screening, I was thinking that this little D.I.Y. geek show manages to touch on every single cinematic subject I’m passionate about except witchcraft, and then I had the joy of rediscovering Mink Stole cooking up a magic rabies potion in a giant cauldron, completing the full set.  I was also delighted to see more graphic queer sex on the big screen for all the same reasons detailed above, including its unexpected contributions to the almighty Plot.  Yes, Waters includes plenty of his signature pure-shock-value sex & violence in Desperate Living, most notably in scenes where Edith Massey’s evil-queen villain expresses a distinctly Gay Male sexuality purely for the audience’s delight: spanking her army of leather-clad twink underlings, huffing their jock straps, and cheerfully exclaiming “Look at those balls!” at their naked, writhing bodies.  However, there’s also a surprising tenderness in the sex scenes between the various lesbian couples of Mortville, most significantly in how Mink Stole’s relationship with fellow fugitive Jean Hill evolves from employer-employee to partners-in-crime to mutually-betrayed-lovers, all tracked through their onscreen sexual contact.

Waters has also been roped into commenting on the state of Gen-Z puriteens and Sex Scene discourse, because he’s the kind of interview subject that regularly gets roped into commenting on the state of everything.  An interviewer from the Los Angeles Review of Books writes, “From the rosary job in Multiple Maniacs, to Divine playing both participants in a filthy roadside fuck in Female Trouble, to penetration via chicken in Pink Flamingos, Waters’s films are chock-full of sexual debauchery.  I elicit his take on a recent opinion, seemingly held among a younger, online generation that sex scenes in films are unnecessary. Waters scoffs: ‘I haven’t heard that one.  That’s a good one.  Young people don’t want to see sex in movies?  Jesus Christ.”  Honestly, I appreciate that complete dismissal of Sex Scene Discourse as a worthwhile topic of discussion even more so than Sachs’s earnest attempts to combat it through his art.  It’s laughable that an entire generation of young people would be disinterested in sex as a cinematic subject; we just happen to live in a time when that outlier opinion gets amplified online for outrage engagement, making the voice of a few sound like the voice of the many.  I can report from the ground that there were plenty of young people (presumably ones with internet access) present at that recent screening of Desperate Living, and they were hooting & hollering just as loud as the elder perverts in the room, myself included.  There was something righteous & defiant about watching such a filthy movie in public (screened as a weekend kickstarter for this year’s Southern Decadence festivities), as if we were protesting for our Constitutional right to watch graphic sex at the multiplex.  Meanwhile, my mid-afternoon screening of Passages at The Broad that same week was much more subdued, as it’s a movie that treats sex as a normal, healthy aspect of daily life instead of a nuclear weapon to wield against Evangelical suburbanites.

In summary, the answer to the supposed problem of Sex Scene Discourse is the same answer to most problems in the Internet Era: go outside.  It helps to live in a sizeable city with adventurously programmed cinemas like The Prytania and The Broad, of course, but according to the easily spooked adult YA readers of the world, you can’t seem to go see any movie without being accosted with an “unnecessary” sex scene these days, so any theater will do.  And if there is absolutely no public access to adult-targeted movies where you live, it is your solemn duty to invite friends over to watch the filthiest movies you own with popcorn at home.  Having recently invited friends over to watch Rinse Dream’s semi-pornographic take on Dr. Caligari, I can proudly say that I am doing my part.  It is imperative that the puriteens do not win this particular battle in the culture war, even though I’m starting to think there aren’t enough puriteens in the world to register as a genuine threat in the first place.

-Brandon Ledet

Dr. Caligari (1989)

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The Criterion Channel has been spoiling me like a little brat all year, handfeeding me cult cinema curios I’ve been desperate to see forever but could never get my hands on through official channels: The Doom Generation, Kamikaze Hearts, Demonlover, Flaming Ears, and the list goes on.  The pummeling rhythm of those dopamine hits have slowed to a trickle in recent months, though, so I’m seeking out my cult classic wishlist items in other venues.  Thankfully, there are a thousand vintage genre-film Blu-ray labels happy to take money from an addict, and I recently scored another notoriously hard-to-find schlock relic off of the trash-hero distro Mondo Macabre.  Their recent 4k restoration of the 1989 absurdist horror sequel Dr. Caligari did not disappoint.  It’s less of a New Wave update of the German Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari than it is a guided tour of the inside of my mind, hosted by a vintage dominatrix with an academic appreciation of Camp.  The second major Caligari revision after the 1920 original (following a Hitchcockian psychodrama version from 1962), this Totally 80s™ take on the story reimagines German Expressionist tropes & aesthetics as MTV era sleaze.  Not to damn it with hyperbole, but it is cinema perfected. 

Given the resume of director Stephen “Rinse Dream” Sayadian (Cafe Flesh, Nightdreams), it might be more appropriate to compare Dr. Caligari‘s spare sets & heightened aesthetics to video store pornography rather than music video artistry.  The handbuilt, absurdly geometric art design and smoke-machine clouded sound stages are pure MTV movie magic, though, imagining a world where Devo scored an adults-only episode of Pee-wee’s Fuckhouse.  Any list of its nearest stylistic comparison points could also be found scribbled in a late-80s art school weirdo’s discarded notebook: the Elfman brothers’ live-action cartoon playground Forbidden Zone; Tim Burton’s higher-budget refinement of Ed Woodian artifice; John Waters’s purposefully overwritten, underperformed brays of dialogue; David Lynch’s eerie atmospheric dissonance.  The angular, poised performances resemble voguing more than acting, preceding Madonna’s appropriation of the trend by at least a year.  There’s even a Cronenbergian flesh wall that kisses its victims back with full tongue.  All of this up-to-date 80s Weirdo posturing is at least anchored to overt references to ancient filmmaking aesthetics, including the fellation of a Wizard of Oz scarecrow, a villainous combination of Marlene Dietrich & Ethyl Merman, and the obvious German Expressionist touches referenced in its title.  It could have only been made in the glory days of early MTV, but its secret weapon is tying that moment to a larger continuum of wet-nightmare cinema – a long, throbbing history of populist art for perverts.

Still, Dr. Caligari‘s plot is befitting of a Rinse Dream porno, and its hyperfixation on women’s orgasms and bare breasts pushes it to the fuzzy borders of softcore.  It’s not a porno parody of the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari so much as it’s a long-gestating sequel.  The titular villain is the granddaughter of the original Caligari, running his legacy insane asylum with newly radical, perverted tactics more befitting of a dominatrix than a psychiatrist.  Her most treasured patient is an oversexed suburban housewife whose Reaganite husband fears his spouse’s “diseased libido.”  Caligari feigns to cure the monstrously horny woman by experimenting with “hormonal interfacing,” but in truth she’s tinkering with ways to weaponize her patient’s sex drive against the men who cower from it.  Caligari’s true lab work involves “hypothalamus injections” that allow her to directly transplant brain fluid—and, thus, character traits—from one patient/victim to another.  It’s a two-part plan that would allow her to fully claim power over her psych ward fiefdom: first by transplanting the horned-up housewife sex drive of her star patient into the minds of all of her professional nemeses, then by injecting the incredible mental powers of her legendary grandfather into her own mind, becoming unstoppable amidst the chaos.  Things do not go according to plan, and her various injections from a “nympholepsy” poisoned mind into her enemies’ hypothalamuses eventually tears down the walls of the Caligari Insane Asylum for good, simply because everyone around her is too horny to control.

If Dr. Caligari is sincerely “about” anything, it’s about Reagan Era suburban fears of sex, particularly of women’s desire & pleasure.  In that context, its spare, post-Apocalyptic set design appears to be a nuked-to-oblivion wasteland rather than a rented LA soundstage.  The nuclear family unit has died from the slow radiation poisoning of the Cold War, leaving the men in charge terrified that the women below them will climb the ladder of chaos in the rubble.  Transplanting those women’s scary libidos into the men’s fragile, fearful minds induces a distinct gender dysphoria horror, erasing their power at the top of the Patriarchy by erasing their manhood altogether.  There’s always a question of whether this is pointed political commentary, an indulgence in softcore forced feminization pornography or, most likely, a purely aesthetic provocation with no guiding sense of purpose.  Every line reading is an act of sarcastic poetry & performance art, putting each overt political statement and subconscious expression of sexual id in gigantic square quotes.  It’s a very specific brand of jaded, ironic, hedonistic fashionista posturing that will test the patience of the sound of mind and pure of heart.  However, if you are impure of heart & libido, you’re likely to fall in love with it, especially in its new, crisp presentation from Mondo Macabre. 

-Brandon Ledet

Chatterbox! (1977)

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I’m currently watching Sex and the City for the first time without ever having much interest in it until now, and it’s instantly become an all-time favorite show.  It turns out it makes a lot more sense once you hit your thirties. Who knew? In the last episode I watched, Charlotte confesses to her brunch buddies that her gynecologist prescribed a mild antidepressant to help get a vaginal infection in-check, pouting in a hushed panic “My vagina is depressed!”  That kind of candid sexual humor was a large part of what made the show such a cultural phenomenon in the early aughts, when it was a lot less common to hear women openly joke about their genitals on national television.  Before then, you had to go digging in smut to find that kind of ribald women’s humor, as evidenced by 1977’s (incredibly well-titled) talking vagina comedy Chatterbox! being directed by gay porno auteur Tom DeSimone.  Chatterbox! only qualifies as a softcore porno if you squint at its AM Gold soft-rock lovemaking scenes with the most puritanical eye. Its main-attraction talking vagina never even makes an appearance on-screen, whether to avoid an X rating or to avoid the practical mechanics of gynecological puppetry.  Still, it’s got a mildly naughty pedigree as an out-of-time, post-hardcore nudie cutie.  It wasn’t until the early 2000s that you could hear women joke about their vaginas having minds of their own on the HBO sitcom equivalent of Seinfeld.  Before then, you had to go see a dirty movie, even if not in the same sketchy theaters where they played DeSimone’s true trenchcoaters.

Most contemporary reviews of Chatterbox! dismissed it as a low-brow, juvenile sex comedy and a masturbatory fantasy for men.  They were only half right.  Yes, the jokes are idiotically crude, like when Virginia the Talking Vagina greets her mother with the zinger, “You didn’t even kiss me hello!” or when a potential sex partner responds to her propositions with “You didn’t even move your lips!”  It’s all harmless schtick, but it’s schtick all the same.  Still, the hapless hairdresser who happens to be attached to Virginia, Penelope, reacts to her supernatural genital predicament with such embarrassed horror that it’s difficult to imagine someone treating the film as pure masturbation fodder.  As much fun as Virginia is having seducing every man (and most women) in their presence, Penelope is mortified that her crotch is getting so much attention, especially by the time the pair become late night talk show regulars as a kind of side show act.  The film is pitched more directly to the women in the audience than you might expect, playing less like a macho fantasy than an adolescent stress dream about showing up to school naked.  Its closest comparison point is The Peanut Butter Solution—a childhood nightmare about rapid hair growth—not the rearranged-female-body misogyny of Deep Throat.  Penelope’s talking, misbehaving vagina is presumably voicing her sexual id, but it does little to bring her out of her shell as a sexual person.  The two are mostly at odds with each other and struggle to find an equilibrium they’re happy with, much like Charlotte York whining about her depressed vagina to friends at brunch.

Chatterbox! is the kind of ramshackle production where the boom mic is onscreen so much it deserves its own character credit.  At one point, Rip Taylor—a total pro—stealthily swats it out of the frame in annoyance for stealing his moment.  The film’s sub-mainstream production values and other titles director’s back catalog (including gems like Swap Meat and Confessions of a Male Groupie) might raise questions of why it didn’t go full-porno, but I personally admire its decision to launch directly into its premise with no funny business.  Virginia starts talking immediately in the first scene, complaining about Penelope’s longtime boyfriend’s lovemaking skills because Penelope would never voice those complaints herself.  It’s not long before they make their debut on stage & television, after Penelope quickly manages to convince her friends & psychiatrist that Virginia really does have a mind of her own.  That efficiency leaves room in the tight 70min runtime for Virginia to launch a star-making career as a disco singer, including multiple performances of her nonsense hit single “Wang Dang Doodle.”  This is an aggressively silly, unsexy sex comedy about a woman’s war with her own body, like a Doris Wishman prototype for How to Get Ahead in Advertising – one with a lot less to say but a much more interesting place to say it from.  I’m sure there are so-bad-its-good cult movie obsessives who think they’re laughing at the movie’s expense—the A Talking Pussy!?! jokes write themselves—but it appears to know exactly how silly and misshapen it is, to the point where it’s always in on the joke. In a word, it’s a hoot.

Also, in case you’re wondering, Penelope is a Charlotte but Virginia is a textbook Samantha. And, yes, I plan on ending every review with this exact analytical lens until I get this show out of my system.

-Brandon Ledet

Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop: How to be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps (1992)

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Before phrases like “sex positivity” & “kink” wormed their way into my vocabulary as a horned-up youth, Annie Sprinkle already embodied them in my mind as a sex-culture mascot.  Like other retro fetish icons like Bettie Page & Dita Von Teese, Annie Sprinkle has seemingly always been around in the public eye as a cheerleader for fun, adventurous sex – reaching me before I was old enough to access pornography without parental surveillance.  I don’t know if I first encountered her in a magazine interview or on a late-night broadcast of HBO’s Real Sex, but she’s definitely one of the first cultural ambassadors for kink & sex positivity that penetrated my sheltered suburban bubble.  Long before I had seen a single frame of her golden age pornos, she symbolized the ways that pornography could be fun & feminist in the right circumstances, which helped shape the ways I think of the medium.

While the mainstream porno Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle is likely her biggest commercial success, I don’t think Sprinkle peaked as artist until a decade later, when she was making avant-garde video art instead of traditional hardcore.  The cult VHS oddity Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop: How to be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps is a tongue-in-ass-cheek instructional video promoting kink & sex positivity, a wonderful document of the Annie Sprinkle ethos.  Co-directed with a young Maria Beatty (who still makes artsy fetish videos like Ecstasy in Berlin, 1926) and scored by experimental electronic musician Pauline Oliveros, the video is ostensibly a taped version of Sprinkle’s sex-positivity workshops that she ran in early-90s NYC but is something much stranger & more cinematic than that documentation implies.  In the video version of the workshop, Sprinkle lectures directly to the camera about the mystical slut/goddess binary. She promises to “awaken your inner slut” and “your inner goddess,” challenging cultural biases that a sexually enthused woman is somehow vulgar or immoral.  She walks you through this spiritual slut awakening in front of surreal green screen video-art effects while arhythmic keyboard flourishes, marching drums, and slide whistles trigger a kind of D.I.Y. psychedelic hypnotism.  Sprinkle declares that she wants the video to make sex “empowering, liberating, and healthy,” but in the process she also makes sex a bizarre psychotronic head-fuck.

While commercially marketed as a porno, the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop plays more like experimental video art than it does like pure erotica.  It’s telling that Sprinkle & Beatty tacked on a lengthy threesome scene at the end of the video as an afterthought, realizing late in production that their sex video didn’t have much actual sex in it.  And even that scene concludes with Sprinkle experiencing a five-minute, unedited orgasm, lecturing about the different levels of orgasmic pleasure in voiceover while a digital clock counts every eternal second.  Everything that precedes that mind-blowing climax lands somewhere between the high-art mysticism of Derek Jarman’s The Garden and the psychedelic sketch comedy of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!.  A kaleidoscope of vulvas undulates on the screen while Sprinkle instructs on how to find “your goddess spot” and makes cheeky puns about how genital piercings make you “holier.”  Brief sex acts shared between her crew of “Transformation Facilitators” are transposed in front of backdrops that are usually reserved for karaoke screens.  The video is often hot and always fun, but it’s less pornography than it is Dianetics for your clit.

As you’d likely expect, not all of Annie Sprinkle’s sex-positive politics have aged gracefully over the past three decades.  The Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop has some major blind spots when it comes to cultural appropriation in particular, encouraging superficial Orientalist engagement with yoga & bindis as cultural costuming instead of genuine spiritual practices.  In the audio commentary on my mid-2000s DVD copy of the film, Sprinkle shrugs off the insensitivity of these missteps, explaining that she didn’t even know what cultural appropriation was at the time of filming.  However, she also recounts that those aspects of the workshop caused some of the video’s more radical performers to walk off-set in protest on the first day of filming, so those conversations were very much being had at the time whether or not she chose to listen.  Still, I’d like to think that it’s worth squinting past Sprinkle’s political blind spots to appreciate her ambassadorship for good sex and good pornography.  After all, she does have an entire section on her Wikipedia page titled “Contributions to Feminism,” which should be some implication of how important her messaging was at the time, short sights aside. 

If there’s anything especially radical about the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, it’s not necessarily in its erotic mysticism or in its video-art psychedelia.  Annie Sprinkle’s most invigorating contribution to pornography is in her D.I.Y. punk ethos, encouraging her audience to have more playful sex and even to make their own pornography at home.  It’s the same mobilizing energy that the Riot Grrrl movement brought to feminist bands & zines at the time, inciting women to make their own self-liberating art in defiance of the era’s cultural gatekeepers.  Sprinkle’s version just happened to allow her to experience a continuous 5-minute orgasm in the process, which is a pretty sweet bonus if you can achieve it.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Eating Raoul (1982)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Paul Bartel’s swinger-culture sex comedy Eating Raoul (1982).

00:00 Welcome

03:40 Thoroughbreds (2017)
04:20 Free Fire (2016)
08:20 Crazy People (1990)
10:25 The Lost Boys (1987)
12:00 Little Joe (2019)
15:20 The Stuff (1985)

18:30 Eating Raoul (1982)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew