Orgasms in Cinema

Today’s essay will be largely descriptions of scenes of sexual orgasm from various movies that stand out in my memory for a variety of reasons, which will become clear to the reader.

Some prefatory observations are in order. First, this essay is not dealing with porn movies per se—as those are defined as necessarily including actual, and not merely “simulated”, orgasm (not to mention a cinematic caliber considerably, if not laughably, below par). Thus, this essay is dealing with movies where the actors and actresses having sex are, in fact (at least as far as we know and reasonably assume), simulating their orgasm, precisely and mainly because producers and directors of conventional movies (of whatever level of artistry, whether “B movies” or better) have not ever seen fit to film their actors and actresses performing actual sex—though rumors about one or two particular movies in this regard refuse to die, as for example with respect to the langorously dead-serious sex scene between Mickey Rourke and Carré Otis in Wild Orchid (1990), not to mention another Mickey Rourke movie, Angel Heart (1987), in which he and Lisa Bonet are depicted as fucking like bunnies on an old poster bed (though without any crucially telltale proof that it is indeed actual and not simulated, and rather a good deal of splicing and cutaways to indicate otherwise).

Secondly, we do not include film scenes that may be sexual and/or erotic, but which do not specifically include the orgasmic moment of sex. There are probably countless more of the former than the latter throughout the archives of all films which fall under the rubric of “mainstream”. Many of these have interesting features which we may write about at a later date, such as, for example, the delicate balancing act some of them execute between trying to depict an authentically sexual scene without, however, crossing the line into explicitly hardcore verity. One example of this that comes to mind is a sex scene between Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson in The Comfort of Strangers (1990) in which, although neither genitalia nor penetration is visualized, the actual humping contiguity in utter nudity of the two principals is so blatant, the viewer wonders how in the world they maintained a mere “simulation” of sex.

At any rate, we offer up here a series of comparisons and/or contrasts of orgasm scenes in relatively mainstream movies, as a way to exercise our prosaic and poetic talents on a particular—and particularly intriguing, in its own subcategorical way—subject that has been left largely unanalyzed.

On one end of a spectrum, so to speak, we have in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) the almost desperate hunger for, and consummation of, sex gleaned less from John Hurt’s visage of a perpetually wizened and leathery inscrutability—relieved dramatically only by his equally perpetually pained eyebrows and gaping mouth—than from the excruciatingly terrible intensity of the actress, Suzanna Hamilton, in her bodily surrender to Hurt’s pummeling her, and most acutely in her facial explosion of orgasmic bliss.

On the other end of that particular spectrum, we have in Network (1976) the wryly anti-climactic moment on William Holden’s face, after he has borne with his doggedly handsome and weatherbeaten features the manic chatter of Faye Dunaway the career woman who can’t stop talking about her hopefully skyrocketing way to the top in network news even while she is with nervous efficiency going about the business of getting herself into bed with Holden, on top of his grudgingly supine body, and off on his understood but unseen erection: While her orgasm comes more or less as a fleeting pause—a breathless moment of silence—in her obsessive stream of verbal diarrhea about herself and her career (which she resumes full steam ahead after that minor interruption), Holden’s puckers his fatigued features in a priceless wince of vague disgust, as though he had just sucked a lemon.

Then there is another spectrum, so to speak—defined at one end by the hypnotically gentle, tantrically breathtaking rapture of coitus between Armand Assante and Blair Brown on the carpeted floor of her office in the made-for-TV movie Hands of a Stranger (1987): a coital embrace, transacted in sitting positions facing each other, unfolding almost motionlessly as Assante whispers to Blair with powerfully gentle insistence, amid the entrancing liquid kisses he exchanges with her, “don’t move. . . don’t move. . . don’t move. . . ”

And, at the other end, we were treated in Five Easy Pieces (1970) to the fascinating spectacle of Jack Nicholson hoisting Sally Struthers up to straddle his mid-section and proceeding to fuck her for what seems like a solid half hour—while standing in the middle of the room, or whirling around in place, or huffing and puffing like a rhino in heat as he tramples aimlessly around the empty house—as she flails blindly in her escalating delirium onto passing doorways—, or ramming her against one wall after another until both of them come like a two-car pile-up.

Next, we have a somewhat similar spectrum with more starkly opposite poles: at one end, in Enemy at the Gates (2001), the hopeless hunger for physical connection between a soldier played by Jude Law and a woman, played by Rachel Weisz, who grope for each other in the half darkness of an underground shelter and, with no privacy available, enact their tragically tender, ravenously grateful lovemaking—luminously suffered in the piercing luminousity of Rachel Weisz’s eyes—as other soldiers lie slumped nearby in their stupor of battle-weary fatigue.

At the other pole of this particular spectrum, we have the ferociously animalistic rape of Isabella Rosselllini by Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet (1986) as he humps her passively surrendered body—his savage obsession focussed upon a swatch of blue velvet he insists on stuffing into her vividly visible vagina before brutalizing her in order to bring himself to his unhinged climax, mouth frothing, face screwed in a mien of fury, eyes blanked white from being rolled back into his skull.

The final polarity contrasts an astoundingly (if queerly) interpersonal sexual union, on the one hand, with an unspeakably vile and vicious sodomy, on the other hand: the former between Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving in The Competition (1980), the latter between Jo Prestia and Monica Bellucci in Irreversible (2002).

In The Competition, there is one scene (or perhaps there are two scenes—my memory is fuzzy on this point) where Dreyfuss, atop the love of his life played by Irving in bed, has sex with her basically in the missionary position: so far, nothing out of the ordinary. However, it is the way he and she insist on fervently locking their eyes on each other during sex, positively riveting their mutually reciprocal stares for the entire time they are doing the act—intensifying their looks of passion almost to the point of terror as their union merges into an almost unbearably orgasmic fusion—, that lifts this scene above others like it.

One could not envision a contrast to the previous lovemaking as total as the anal rape scene in Irreversible. Not only, of course, does it not depict a loving—or even casually playful—intercourse, its entire construction reverses sex into its horrifically abominable opposite: it is a rape forced by physical intimidation; the man compels the woman to face away from him, lying face-down with her face in the dirty concrete of an underground subway corridor; it transpires entirely in one long six minutes where the camera remains fixed at one vantage, close to the concrete, abasing the organic dynamism of sex into an immobile agony of desecration. And, flouting political correctness about the issue of rape, the director has the rapist character, “La Tenia”, quite clearly enjoying himself sensually—when he is not striking the woman’s head in barbaric spasms of anger—for a few minutes at the beginning, then quite concretely (albeit sickeningly) enjoying himself sexually as he rides his victim toward his ruthless orgasm at her body’s, and soul’s, expense.

I’m not especially keen to end on such an abysmally grim note, but I trust the reader is mature enough to digest and assimilate my essay as a whole as food for thought, and not fixate—to the detriment of his or her reading pleasure—on one small portion of it merely because it happens to fall at the tail end.

Instantaneity: A Problem with Computer Technology

Technology is not merely a field or system of inert machinery whose effects and dynamics can be studied in abstraction from the human element. Technology—insofar as humans invent it, maintain it, use it, and continually perfect it—is part of human being: it is inextricably woven into the fabric of human existence, and has been for as long as humans have had historical memory.

The thesis of today’s blog essay will focus only on one microcosmic aspect of the macrocosm of technology: the phenomenon, or quality, of instantaneity in technology, and how this provides one insight into the uniqueness of computer technology vis-à-vis other forms of technology.

Unlike most other forms of technology, the technology of personal computers has a feature that is fairly systemic, and certainly central—particularly with regard to the most common role of personal computers, Net navigation—, in its operations by which the human user interacts with it: delayed response. And this feature—delayed response—is the precise opposite of our thematic concept: instantaneity.

Instantaneity means “the capacity to act or respond immediately, instantly.” Of course, by “instantly”, we do not mean it with any kind of scientific or metaphysical literalism: we mean it only in terms of its relatively subjective sufficiency. And the subjective experience of instantaneity will not vary significantly from one person to the next. I do not know if there have been actual psychological studies measuring what infinitessimal time increment is a statistically measured norm for a threshhold for instantaneity. Personally, I would put that increment at one second. I think most people would agree with me.

By the term “infinitessimal time increment”, I mean simply the smallest time passed for a response from technology, from the moment the human enacts an operation by engaging his technology, to the moment that technology in question responds to the human action. The technology’s response time should be no longer than one second, if we are going to call it “instantaneous”. Any longer than one second, and that technology’s response time is no longer instantaneous, but is demonstrating a delayed response.

Of course, once we establish this definition of a delayed response—and its diametric corollary, instantaneity—there is the other matter of degrees. Obviously, a machine that has a delayed response of two seconds is significantly different from a machine that has a delayed response of 20 seconds. Both machines, nevertheless, are operating according to delayed response: the difference is only a matter of degree. Degrees do matter: and so, in addition to the fundamental binary distinction that divides all technology according to whether they operate instantly or by delayed response, we may also consider that the technology of the second class—of delayed response—is further subdivided into degrees of delayed response. Within this subdivision, the distinctions begin to be more subjective: one man’s length of response time felt to be unacceptable will be, to another man, more or less acceptable (or even the same man may feel the same length of response time to be acceptable or unacceptable depending on that man’s mood, etc.).

As we said above, personal computer technology involves a great deal of delayed response time. The vast majority of other technologies that people deal with on a daily basis, however, involve very little or virtually no delayed response time. Most other technologies, in fact, provide instantaneity in their operations which synergize the human user with them. This quality of non-PC technology was even more the case with the increasingly simpler technology of the past. Pre-electrical technology, particularly, provided the eminently satisfying instantaneity of the hammer hitting the nail on the head. I.e., in classical technology, percussion was key, and percussion delivers an immediate response. Even where a system of complicated gears was involved, the engagement of those gears—which the human user understood, because it was understandable even to the simple mind—was responsively immediate, and their deployment clear and productive. Of course, when the machine malfunctioned, this instantaneity of classical technology was frustrated: but even when classical technology malfunctions, it is not as maddeningly cryptic as the innumerable bugs and mysteries which tend to plague the personal computer.

In one sense, the history of technology can be divided into three overall phases:

1) mechanical technology

2) electrical technology

3) computer technology.

I think it can be argued that the term classical technology embraces phases 1 and 2, while some other term is needed to denote the radically new form that has emerged with phase 3. That is to say, electrical technology was not a radical break from mechanical technology, so much as it was an amazing extension of its logical systems. And, while of course computer technology has not fallen from the blue sky de novo but has developed in great part from already existing precursors within the systems of classical technology, nevertheless its nature and effects are so profoundly unique that it deserves to be given a new rubric to distinguish it from classical technology. For now, I would use the obvious term post-classical technology.

Assigning temporal boundaries to these divisions is somewhat difficult, since there is considerable overlap, but if we simply use the dates each subsequent technology began to be socially influential, we could say the following:

1) mechanical technology—prehistoric era to the late 19th century

2) electrical technology—late 19th century to the mid-1980s

3) computer technology—the mid 1980s to the ongoing present.

With both mechanical technology and electrical technology, the vast majority of technological implements and machines deliver instantaneity. With personal computer technology, the phenomenon of delayed response is all too common. I submit that this delayed response is, and will be over time, exerting psychological and ergonomic effects upon the human users. Never before in history has man interacted so regularly with, and has become so dependent upon, a technology so riddled with delayed response mechanisms. Surely this must be exerting a toll, however seemingly subtle it may be, upon those who use PCs so much—not only to those old enough to remember what life was like before the late 80s, when most daily ordinary technology provided instantaneity, but also to the younger generation, because the older forms of technology have not become extinct but perdure in myriad ways. And there is no reason to think that those older forms of mechanical and electrical technology will disappear anytime soon. And, of course, while there are still millions who do not have computers, and millions more who may have them or have access to them but use them only relatively rarely, it is a safe bet that the proportion of PC users will continue to expand in the near future, perhaps at an astronomic rate.

Who knows what the effects are of repeated, regular, ordinary delayed response on a human interacting with technology. One effect that comes to mind—particularly since I rather consciously experience it with my PC—is stress: more specifically, what physical therapists these days call “micro-stressors”. These micro-stressors exert stress on the human, but the effects for the most part remain subliminal, below the threshhold of consciousness, although they can build up over time and can cause actual muscular tension or pain, and/or psychosomatic symptoms of fatigue.

Perhaps because of my intellectual interest in, and awareness of, this phenomenon of instantaneity, I am rather acutely conscious of what for other people might be micro-stressors, and it bugs the hell out of me when I click my mouse somewhere, reasonably expecting a quick response time, and end up having to wait 10 or 15 or 20 seconds—sometimes up to 60 seconds and beyond. Even 10 seconds can be a long time, when the expectation is an immediate response. For the reader who might dismiss my pet peeve here with a smile, I would invite them to imagine how they would feel going through the day (let alone going through the week or month or year!), where every simple ordinary action of classical or electrical technology—whose instantaneity they take for granted—suddenly performed with delayed response time. And this scenario should not merely imagine a delayed response time, but also another feature I neglected to mention: an unpredictably variable delayed response time. So in this scenario, imagine you get up in the morning and you reach over to hit the snooze bar on your alarm, and you have to wait 15 seconds before it turns off. Then you reach over to switch on your bedside lamp—and you have to wait 10 seconds before it turns on. And you remember the last time you turned it on, it took only 2 or 3 seconds; then the next morning when you go to turn it on, it will suddenly, unpredictably take 20 seconds. Then you stumble into the bathroom to take a piss, but you have to wait 20 seconds before the toilet seat goes up at your prompting (or 5 or 10 or 30... you can never predict how long). Into the kitchen, the refrigerator door takes 70 seconds to open, when the previous evening it only took 15 seconds. And so on. I think the reader gets my drift now. I wager that the reader would not tolerate such a relationship with technology as my scenario describes. Or, if the reader tolerated it, he would not like it, and would feel stressed, maybe grumpy at times, and would want to complain about it once in a while.

It seems odd that personal computers are so modern, so dynamically on the cutting edge of the future, and yet they cannot sufficiently provide the simple, yet so wonderfully pleasing and satisfying, quality of instantaneity—a quality that most technology has been providing to its human partners for millennia.