For all the moans of pleasure and beautiful writhing bodies, Sex on Screen is frequently hard to watch. From its first moments, which recreate preparations for a sex scene on a film set, the tension is palpable. This is made all the more stressful by interviews with actors including Jane Fonda and Rose McGowan, who asks us to imagine the dehumanising experience of spending hours “out there while men in parkas are staring at you with no shirt on”. But what makes Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s documentary so remarkable is its steadfastly non-puritanical approach. Despite the horror stories, many actors and filmmakers remain enthusiastic about depicting intimacy and shaking up representations of desire.
Storyville’s latest film looks at sex on screen, from the photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century studies of motion to the current series of the Sex Lives of College Girls, and doesn’t shy away from the dark side of its history. And to convincingly argue for sex-positive systemic change rather than a broad reimplementation of the censorious Hays code, the documentary leaves no stone unturned. It explores not only on-set behaviour but the effect on gender politics of sex on screen; the objectification of body doubles and women of colour; and (delightfully) the intricate artistry of constructing merkins.
Rather than simply leave the audience to determine what all this means, Guevara-Flanagan maintains a direct link between sex on screen and broader misogyny in society. The film shows how generations of men have been raised watching aggressive romantic leads that make women submit to them, or films such as Midnight Cowboy or Carnal Knowledge that view sex as a “homo-social activity”, where women are a tool to prove men’s masculinity to one another. It argues that generations of men – Harvey Weinstein being only one famous example – were able to spend decades harassing and abusing women with impunity partly because cinema normalised such behaviour.
Proving that thesis seems a mammoth task, but in less than 90 minutes the documentary covers astonishing ground. The pace occasionally borders on frantic and some parts feel rushed, such as the harrowed special effects artist who talks about the eerie decision to have Lena Headey’s head digitally placed on another woman’s naked body for Cersei’s infamous march of shame in Game of Thrones. But he expresses most discomfort with the increasing demand for “perfecting” actors’ “flaws”. His insight into inhuman beauty standards and the pressure to digitally slim down bodies and make actors “look like china dolls with flawless faces” hints at a troubling future, particularly given the rise of deep fake pornography. Yet the film breezes past the potential horrors of this technology to link it to the (admittedly salient) point that fat nudity is nearly always used as a punchline, making fat women feel desexualised and devalued in the wider world.
The film’s plain-speaking approach is wonderfully refreshing. Queer, trans and disabled actors talk about how empowering it has been for them to be sexualised on screen and create representation they didn’t see growing up. Others reflect on times when they felt powerless and did what they were told for fear of disappointing directors. That culture of silence is what allowed the most insidious practices to flourish. Simply talking about sex is in itself a powerful act: as the director Karyn Kusama reminds us, “There’s so much shame around the body, around desire, because it remains this forbidden area of our lives.”
Shame seems to be the true rot in these foundations; even the most sex-positive stars talk disturbingly about “blacking out” or “leaving their bodies” during sex scenes. In the case of the actor Emily Meade, who played a porn star on HBO’s The Deuce, she found herself “dissociating almost every day at work”. But in one of the documentary’s most remarkable moments, we hear how in 2018, after allegations around her co-star James Franco came to light, the showrunner opened up a dialogue with his female stars. Meade’s ingenuity led to one of the most tangible results of the #MeToo movement in Hollywood – the introduction of intimacy coordinators. The scenes in which we see what an intimacy coordinator actually does (in this case, Sarah Scott, who also offers a deeply disturbing account of an incident that happened to her as an actor) show what professionalism can bring to a vulnerable scene, and how much can be fixed with a well-placed elbow and a simple: “Does this feel OK to you?”
As the film concludes, plenty of harrowing tales and damning indictments stick in the mind, but there are significantly more reasons to feel hopeful. We hear from a plethora of powerful women, including the Transparent creator Joey Soloway, the actor Rosanna Arquette, the trans actor and activist Alexandra Billings and other formidable forces in the film industry. Each appears determined to reorder the status quo, to use the “female lens” to fight the patriarchy and to tell stories that cut to “the notion of female desire, be it ambition, or sex, or romance”. As they stare down the lens, no longer silent or ashamed, they seem set to reshape not just sex on screen but the world itself.
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Sex on Screen was shown on BBC Four and is now on iPlayer
