Also, I take exception to Hollywood’s notion that watching explicit sex scenes in movies is necessary to the plot and that we are somehow more informed by having witnessed it. Informed of what, I wonder? News flash! People have been fornicating since Adam and Eve got it on in that infamous garden some eons ago. We don’t need an instructional video to show us how it’s done. Oh, but wait! It’s not instructional you say? Its entertainment? Well, that’s a whole different argument. Being entertained is purely subjective and every person has a right to his own idea of entertainment. If a person gets turned on by watching seemingly endless and often excruciatingly boring sex scenes in an otherwise good movie, who am I to say they are wrong? As far as being entertained by sex on screen, I just don’t get it. The presumption that by showing a couple in bed grunting and sweating and rolling around in simulated ecstasy until climax, we have just been exposed to "ART", is to my mind idiotic. I concede that while watching an explicit sex scene play out with all the attendant audio that goes with it might be entertaining to one person, others hold the view that watching an intelligent, sophisticated movie without all the sexual content is very satisfying. No movie – and I mean NOT ONE – has ever been made better by including explicit sex scenes.

I saw more than my share of porn movies back when you could rent XXX movies from the back room at the video store on VHS and there was no pretence to plot or denouement in those flicks. But people rented those movies for one reason only and I don’t think it was exactly for their entertainment value. Well, maybe entertainment of a sort. At least in the XXXs, the actors were actually screwing so there was no pretence and I guess there is some merit in that honesty. Those films didn’t pretend to be "ART" simply because the sex was explicit. Plus, in those films you got to see lots of phalluses. No hypocrisy there!

I myself get more of a turn-on from watching Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds dance the night away than I would should they be engaged in an all night ménage a trois. Nor would I have enjoyed watching Bogart and Bergman wrestling around naked in the classic "Casablanca". Did they have sex? Without a doubt. Who cares? The fact of it is unnecessary to the plot. Until the sexual revolution in the 60s, couples were not even allowed to be shown on screen in the same bed. Were we deprived intellectually and artistically because of this? I think not. Was "Now Voyager" any less artfully done because we were not subjected to watching Paul Henried and Bette Davis humping their way across the Atlantic Ocean down to Rio? I shudder to think of what that bunch of Hollywierd assholes would do to the making of

"Boom Town" in which Clark Gable and Heddy Lamar carry on an illicit love affair, or "To Catch a Thief" in which Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, of course, screwed up a storm in that hotel room. In "All About Eve", there is ample opportunity to exploit the implied sex between both Bette Davis and Gary Merrill and Anne Baxter and George Sanders. And imagine how that bunch would have butchered "High Noon" by ignoring the real drama in the film and emphasizing the sexual relationship between Gary Cooper and Katy Jurado, thereby ravaging it in the name of "ART". Let us hope they never get the idea they can "improve" these classics and remake them with a whole new cast.

I have never seen a movie (and I’ve seen hundreds) in which the story was improved by a lengthy, agonizing on-screen orgasmic sexual encounter. I have never felt anything I did in the bedroom was entertainment (except, hopefully, to my partner) any more than I consider watching say Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei in "Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead" or Anthony LaPalia and Rachael Blake in "Lantana" to name just a couple, in the prolonged sex scenes contained in those movies as entertainment. Both are good movies, by the way. But I wonder if they would not have been improved by eliminating the agonizingly interminable sex?

Ever since the onset of "enlightenment in American cinema", we’ve been subjected to every kind of human indignity, frailty, and cruelty that men could possibly think of to do to each other. While I do not subscribe to the belief that ignorance is bliss, neither do I believe we are better off for having had all the ugliness that Hollywood could possibly imagine shoved down our throats for so long nor that "ART" is served by it. I wonder what have I gained in personal grace by having seen Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, or Halle Berry nude? Even the "old ladies" are now baring their bosoms in movies. I can’t imagine that having seen Diane Keaton’s titties in the gawd-awful disaster of a film "Something’s Gotta’ Give" has left me any better off.

I guess in the opinion of the self-proclaimed cinematic elite, we’ve reached artistic nirvana in the movies, but are we really more culturally superior for having come this far? And has all that cultural advancement really improved our lives? But, the purpose of this dissertation is to take exception to the hypocrisy of those arrogant, Hollywood avant-garde directors who contend that art is somehow served by displaying coarse, raw realism on the screen. And to take exception to the fact that the guys get a pass on the nudity bit. All I want to say to the current bunch of Hollywood film makers, that until they start showing male frontal nudity as well as female nudity, "You’ve come a long way, baby", but you still have a long way to go. Not until the guys drop their drawers have we arrived at the summit. And not until the job is finished can the Hollywood honchos legitimately give themselves kudos for a job well done.
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