Let’s Gawk about Sex

Sex is back!

Nope, sex is gone again.

No, now it’s back.

Yeah, sorry, afraid not.

Goddamn it! Sex, will you just pick a position and stick with it.

“Bahahahha,” says sex. “That’s not what I do…69 DUUUUUUUUUDES!” and runs off giggling.

Every generation rediscovers sex, or so the saying goes, but with the new wave of sex comedies, it’s the older generation lecturing the younger ones, “Hey, kids, sex is cool.”

“Eeeeww,” say the kids, quite rightfully.

The Invite, I Want Your Sex and the upcoming (heh…) Wicker are only a few of the recent films that use intimacy and all its entanglements to go deeper into human behaviour.

The reaction is almost as interesting as the films themselves. Essays and op-eds in places like the Guardian and the Atlantic press to know, “What’s all this sex stuff about, then?” It’s better if you say it with a Cockney accent.

The internet has also outdone itself in coming up with the most ridiculous memes, featuring Ikea furniture, wicker baskets and actor Alexander Skarsgård in the horny silliness engendered by the Wicker trailer. I can only imagine the outpouring when the actual film comes romping into theatres.

One of the most interesting of the recent sexy cinematic releases is The Invite (still in theatres and streaming now in Canada on Video on Demand). Based on a stage play from Spanish writer Cesc Gay who then adapted it into an independent film, the story has since been the basis for seven different iterations in countries around the globe.

The English language version is directed by American filmmaker and actress Olivia Wilde (Booksmart), who also takes on one of the title roles. Alongside Wilde, the film features Vancouver’s Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, all in tip-top form.

The Invite is a hit and deservedly so. It is one of those rare films for adults that makes you laugh, wince and get wildly emotional. Excruciating but also extremely funny, it’s a movie you watch between your fingers.

I saw it in a theatre with other people obviously having volatile reactions to the story as the spontaneous groans, laughter and pained sighs made explicit. We all should have shared a collective smoke after the film was over.

Set almost entirely in one San Francisco apartment, the film is very much a chamber piece, but this insularity serves a point. We see the main characters Angela (Wilde) and Joe (Rogen) briefly out in the wider world. Joe is depicted not listening to a torturous jazz standard at the music conservatory where he works, while Angela is busily preparing a lavish dinner party, buying fancy cheese, flowers and charcuterie. The minute the couple meet up in the vestibule of their apartment the muttering violins in the film’s score tell you everything you need to know. Things are not going well between these two.

He hates his job. She hates her life. They each blame for the other person for their towering level of dissatisfaction. Also, they’re not having sex. More on this particular crimp in the relationship later. First there’s a dinner party to prepare for.

Even as Joe is maintaining that he wasn’t informed, isn’t into it and forgot to get wine, Angela is changing outfits, fixing her hair and is obviously close to epic meltdown. It doesn’t take long before the pair is in a furious argument when, ding dong, the couple upstairs have arrived for dinner.

Hawk (a former firefighter) played by Norton and his girlfriend Piña (Cruz), a counsellor and sexologist are as loopy and goopy as Joe and Olivia are brittle and bitter. Draped over each other and giving off the salty funk of orgiastic satisfaction, they pretty much have sexy cartoon stink lines emanating from them.

Competing agendas are immediately work even as the quartet take stock and make small talk. Joe wants to confront the neighbours for their extremely loud lovemaking. Angela is determined to stop him from saying anything. But Hawk and Piña have their own plans for the evening. From the outset, things go wrong. Piña doesn’t eat meat, the soufflé is burnt and the atmosphere is confrontational, bordering on belligerent between the men. So, sex isn’t exactly the first thing you might think of in this scenario.

Here's the rub, take that as you will. Sex has a way of stripping off politesse and getting down to it and that’s exactly what happens here. As the upstairs couple reveal that their midnight screaming orgasms are the result of participating in group sex sessions, Joe and Angela are sufficiently intrigued that all their wrangling and arguments fall away. This is where things get interesting in grownup fashion.

An adult film might mean different things to different folks, but here it reminds me of the scene in The Simpsons when Bart wanders into the curtained-off section of the video store only to discover it contains the work of Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut and Roberto Rossellini. The Invite is also a film that contends with the meat of middle age, disappointment, regret, suffocation, all the good stuff. Okay, but what about the surprisingly sex-averse youth of today?

Esther Perel’s work as a psychotherapist was an inspiration for The Invite. Olivia Wilde has included many of Perel’s ideas in the film and arguably Cruz’s character plays a version of her in the story.

Perel, who came to super stardom counselling folks on intimacy or lack thereof, has an explanation for the current lack of sex in the younger generation: fear. In an interview with Vanity Fair she said, “This is a generation that actually doesn’t have a challenge of sustaining desire; they don’t even ignite it. You know, it’s not about keeping the flame going. It’s about getting the spark going. They don’t drink. They have not had much experience in their 20s, one or two relationships at most. They don’t have sex much. They don’t socialize much. They’re home a lot.”

Ouch, Esther, but fair.

Sex is about the possibility of change, of becoming a different person for a time. As Piña (in the guise of Perel) states in the film, sex isn’t something that you do, “It’s a place that you go.” In this sense, it is an escape hatch from the constraints of bad jobs, disappointment, the spectre of age and irrelevance. But to get to this place of surrender requires a kind of sacrifice.

For the younger generations, you would think this kind of deep dive would be easier. After all, the millennial, gen Z and whatever the heck came after that generations were raised with the internet and every possible permeation of the erotic. Why the kids just don’t seem into it is the question that’s launched a thousand opinion pieces. Whether it’s anti-anxiety meds or the over-saturation of porn or fear of intimacy in a world of photoshopped perfection, I’m sure there’s not a single easy answer.

Still, life has a way of reasserting itself and the emergence of the sexy movie in this moment feels like a desperate call for honesty and humanness.

Let me blunt for a moment. Whenever I get a horrible, insane-making infatuation with some random person, it’s usually because I feel stuck in my own life. I would argue that very many of us feel a bit stuck — culturally, socially, politically — and are looking for some spark of liberation.

In The Invite, sex isn’t a panacea, but rather an instigating element, something to set fire to the dry brush that is a dead marriage and burn everything to the ground. But from scorched earth a few bits of new growth can emerge.

In this aspect, I find the resurgence of cinematic sex strangely heartening. These works invite us to feel the anticipation of trying something different. To be charged by “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” as poet Dylan Thomas once euphemistically stated.

Sex is a call to life, messy, embarrassing, redemptive, mammalian, ridiculous, sublime. It is human at its most bare and basic. We all need some of that.