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.