The U-turn back to Sexy?
I just hope it's not my wishful thinking and we're finally rebelling
Warning: This might be considered an 18+ piece, for, as Joss Whedon’s Captain America would say, “Language!“
In November last year Netflix released a new movie by David Fincher called The Killer with Michael Fassbender as the eponymous character (we don’t get to learn his actual name).
The first sequence, as some have said, could be a short film on its own: we see The Killer spending time in the nest set up in front of the building where his target is to show up. In the meantime, we see him do *incredible* yogic sun salutations (I’m thirty and I can only wish I was capable of this backbend), listen to The Smiths and walk out occasionally to get some food. We also hear him narrate loads of incohesive gibberish — some “interesting” statistics and quotes and thoughts(?) — which probably should leave the viewer with the impression of how meticulous The Killer is at his job, how careful he is to prepare everything for that one shot to happen.
And then we see him botch it spectacularly.
Shenanigans and countless international flights ensue. Time and time again we hear him narrate about his planning, we see him prepare, and we see things go very much not according to the plan. The movie is actually hilarious in this discrepancy. I was positively mesmerised.
What we also see is Fassbender dressed in the blandest fashion, using most generic fake names, eating fast food, using global delivery services to get the necessary stuff. We see his — inexplicably young and foreign-hence-kinda-exotic — girlfriend who gets into trouble because of him, but we don’t really see much of her, she kinda just exists, so we don’t care.
That’s actually the problem my friends had with The Killer. It doesn’t make you care. There’s no point in the narrative. It’s all boring clichés, going through the typical motions.
But that is what I think was exactly the point. To make this international assassin thing *boring*. Personality-free. Incompetent and sterile. Deeply, profoundly unsexy. You know, a commentary on our culture. I mean, this guy made Fight Club.
Ironically, I feel like The Killer’s release coincided with the U-turn to sex and sex-appeal.
First, it makes sense to outline what was the trajectory from which we are, I believe, U-turning. And that trajectory was best encapsulated in a 2021 essay, which appears to be widely known in narrow circles, called “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny“ by Raquel S. Benedict. I highly recommend reading it in its entirety but I will pull what I feel to be the key quote:
A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy. It, too, is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets. Our bodies are investments, which must always be optimized to bring us… what, exactly? Some vague sense of better living? Is a life without bread objectively better than a life with it? When we were children, did we dream of counting every calorie and logging every step?
A generation or two ago, it was normal for adults to engage in sports not purely as self-improvement but as an act of leisure. People danced for fun; couples socialized over tennis; kids played stickball for lack of anything else to do. Solitary exercise at the gym also had a social, rather than moral, purpose. People worked out to look hot so they could attract other hot people and fuck them. Whatever the ethos behind it, the ultimate goal was pleasure.
Not so today. Now, we are perfect islands of emotional self-reliance, and it is seen as embarrassing and co-dependent to want to be touched. […]
Contemporary gym ads focus on rigidly isolated self-improvement: be your best self. Create a new you. We don’t exercise, we don’t work out: we train, and we train in fitness programs with names like Booty Bootcamp, as if we’re getting our booties battle-ready to fight in the Great Booty War. There is no promise of intimacy. Like our heroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, like Rico and Dizzy and all the other infantry in Starship Troopers, we are horny only for annihilation.
There are multiple factors contributing to the trend and Benedict lists some of them, but I think some are omitted. One of them is the major movie companies’ drive to appeal to wider audiences to grab more cash as a result. You just can’t afford to be too local (i.e. context dependent), or offensive and not PG-13.
Another one, which may be more important, is the shift into the digital space, where by definition you cannot get physical. It all becomes about a body image. There’s no interaction in this. As everything else, the body becomes a primarily visual commodity. Pleasure is derived from the likes your body’s image manages to gather. And here, again, the wider the audience you can appeal to, the more likes you’d gather, the more ‘pleasure’ you’d get. So, your body has to be clean, lean and shaven.
Enter Jacob Elordi’s bathwater.
Of course, the reverse didn’t happen overnight and Saltburn wasn’t the film to flip the switch. The wave was gathering for a year or two already. But *that scene* became the talk of the town: so much so, I read it somewhere that grossed-out people left the cinema during the movie1. Which I take as a testament to how much we deny the sex drive, which is by its nature carnal: that desire to consume the other and to dissolve yourself in that act. We’re such control freaks, that that’s too much to bear. (Even though, ironically, porn is so ubiquitous, pre-teen kids are casually exposed to it. Which still shocks me but I guess the walls of my personal content bubble have already solidified.)
Then you also have the absolutely unapologetic Poor Things. And, while those movies still haven’t reach me, I believe both All Of Us Strangers and Love Lies Bleeding (both queer, by the way) are überphysical. Extremely silly Bottoms and extremely cheesy Red, White & Royal Blue from the summer of 2023 were maybe less explicit, but still very much horny (and also queer). And that’s only the most fresh ones that come to my mind.
I wonder what it was that caused the shift. Was it the pandemic? The physical separation it caused and so, longing for intimacy? Or is it cookie-cutter-blockbuster-fatigue and so, the return of a mid-budget movie, which can afford to explore humanity together with the occasional grossness of bodily fluids and flappy skin? Whatever it is, I hope it is here to stay, because of how refreshing it feels. Granted, the trend is swinging quite far in the opposite direction, but I guess there was no other way for us to get out of this but shock therapy. And don’t get me wrong, I dearly love Chris Evans as Steve Rogers, but transgression was long due.
Or is it even fair to call that transgressive or gross? After all, that’s *us*. That’s what we’re actually like (sometimes, oftentimes — that’s all semantics and matter of degree). Our bodies were built for movement. Our brains were wired for company. And yet some glitch in our ratio decided that civilizational progress equals getting rid of our physicality and abstracting ourselves from nature, and from ourselves and each other.
And what we ended up with is an odd concoction of brutality and sterility.
The Killer and Saltburn were widely released in the same month, and if you ask me, there couldn’t be a more perfect coincidence.
To the uninitiated: in the move, Jacob Elordi’s handsome and rich character befriends Barry Keoghan’s less handsome and rich character at the uni and invites him to his family’s residence for the summer, where they end up sharing the bathroom. At one point, Keoghan’s character watches how Elordi’s character masturbates while taking a bath, and after he leaves, Keoghan’s character slurps the remaining bathwater and even licks the drain. Just so you know, that’s not even the most carnal scene of the movie.